Research suggests that kindergarten attenders benefit from the time spent learning basic academic and social skills. Skills students learn in kindergarten lead to skills taught in first grade and school readiness; however, many children do not attend kindergarten. The problem under study was that records indicate that many students do not attend…

This study compares latent profiles derived from student subgroups of varying levels of mathematical skills defined by achievement and ability assessment scores. Achievement and ability cut scores for identifying students at both ends of the mathematics spectrum were applied and the resulting latent profiles within each condition were compared.…

This study examined the direct and indirect relationships between playfulness (social and cognitive spontaneity), executive functions, convergent thinking, divergent thinking, and academic skills in Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children. Participants were 181 second-year (4 to 5 years) kindergarten children (45.9% boys) and their parents.…

Students' ability to operate with increasingly more complex units has been shown to be a key factor in their conceptual development. These abilities have been characterized as "stages of units coordination." This article focuses on the domain of composing and decomposing composite units. Using data from a teaching experiment with a…

Background: The importance of parental beliefs and practices related to children's school readiness skills is widely documented, but few studies explicitly focus on immigrant families. Further, no known studies have examined immigrant parents' beliefs about what skills children need to be successful in kindergarten. Objectives: The overarching aim…

Our study examined young children's pre-academic and social skills in relation to parental locus of control and children's behaviours of ADHD. The participants were parents of 1,502 children from four Chinese kindergartens (M[subscript age] = 4.59, SD = 0.93; Girls: 51.40%). Data on six domains of children's pre-academic and social skills,…

This study examined the development of the evaluation of praise that differs in congruence between what the praiser is praising (i.e. effort or ability) and what led the recipient to succeed. Children aged 7 and 8 years (second graders) and 10 and 11 years (fifth graders), as well as adults, made emotional and motivational evaluations about…

Background: Well-being is a key aspect of children's education, yet measurement issues have limited studies in early primary school. Aims: The current 12-month longitudinal study assesses the temporal stability of child- and parent-reported school well-being and examines developmental links with academic self-concept and parent-rated prosocial…

Background: Pre-k convergence refers to the tendency for the positive effects of pre-k on children's academic skills to diminish over time, observed across decades of observational and experimental studies (Ansari et al., 2020). Researchers have tested multiple mechanisms to explain convergence, with mixed results; none of the proposed mechanisms…

Kindergarten requirements are changing across the world as early school readiness has been linked to future school success. However, smaller European countries like Slovakia often lack a research base of their own, relying instead on research in other countries, particularly the US. The purpose of this study was to understand perceptions of…

Background: As one of the mainstream forms of programming education, educational robotics (ER) have been a crucial way to develop K-12 students' programming ability. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to clarify the content of programming ability, to verify the effectiveness of ER as a teaching method to improve students' programming…

The "Pygmalion effect," is a construct that states that people often rise to the level that is expected of them (Chang, 2011). This is closely related to the "law of expectations," in which individuals receive what they expect to receive. These ideas may be applied to the educational arena when related to teacher perceptions…

Understanding predictors and effects of teacher well-being, including job satisfaction, is crucial for both teachers' and children's development. Research on teacher job satisfaction (TJS) has indicated that many individual and contextual factors may make a difference for teachers' professional well-being. However, against the backdrop of this…

American students continue to perform poorly on national and international assessments of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) competencies, and achievement gaps spanning racial/ethnic and socioeconomic lines emerge early and widen over time. Scholars and practitioners agree that expanding access to high-quality STEM education…

Background: Performance with fractions has been a weak point in U.S. education for decades and has not improved in recent years (Siegler, 2017). High School math teachers frequently rate their students' knowledge of fractions as "poor" and see this lack of foundational knowledge as one of the top barriers to students mastering algebra…