The purpose of this archival quantitative research study was to investigate the effects of relative age and eligibility for special education through third grade. This study further examined relative age as it related to gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and multilingual learner status on eligibility for special education under the…

Children's motor competence (MC) levels tend to be low, and the investigation of variables that facilitate skillfulness is an important concern. The socioecological model is a useful framework to explore factors that influence MC and to inform the development of targeted interventions. This cross-sectional study aimed to perform an exploratory…

This study examined relationships between specific data on students referred for and placed in the exceptional children's program. The context is a rural North Carolina county and included 206 records of K-6th graders spanning academic years 2007-08, 08-09 and 09-10. The kindergarten entrance ages of students were divided into categories of on…

The authors' primary aim was to investigate a potential causal relationship between spatial ability and math ability. To do so, they used a pretest-training-posttest experimental design in which children received short-term spatial training and were tested on problem solving in math. They focused on first and second graders because earlier studies…

On 10 December 2007 the Akron City School Board--following the precedent set by many school systems across the United States and the world--instituted a policy of mandatory school uniforms for all students in grades K-8. The measure was met with mixed reviews. While many parents supported the measure, a small group of parents from a selective,…

Background: A strong link between phonological awareness (PA) and literacy exists, but the origins of this link are difficult to investigate, since PA skills are hard to test in young, pre-literate children, and many studies neither include such children nor report children's initial literacy levels. Aims: To examine PA and literacy in children…

Individual differences in emotion, cognitions, and task choice following achievement failure are found among four- to seven-year-olds. However, neither performance deterioration during failure nor generalization after failure--aspects of the helpless pattern in 10-year-olds--have been reliably demonstrated in this age group. In the present study,…

Two groups of 8- to 10-year-olds differing in rapid automatized naming speed but matched for age, verbal and nonverbal ability, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and visual acuity participated in four experiments investigating early visual processing. As low RAN children had significantly slower simple reaction times (SRT) this was…

Current assessment practices in the United States are not able to accurately capture the total linguistic, cognitive, and achievement abilities of bilingual learners. There are psychometric complexities involved when assessing and interpreting test results of bilingual students, which impact the validity of this practice. Further, the compromise…

Several studies have reported significant relationships between children's season of birth and measures of their academic success (i.e., the "season of birth effect"). Whereas most of these studies were cross-sectional, the current study uses growth curve modelling to analyse longitudinal data on 3,187 children in Flemish primary…

Educational TV has been consistently linked to children's learning. In this research, educational TV characteristics were identified, coded, and tested for their influence on children's program-specific comprehension and vocabulary outcomes. Study 1 details a content analysis of TV features including a program's macrostructure (i.e., narrative or…

This study examined the relations of age, preschool experience, and gender with children's school readiness levels at kindergarten entry. The sample included 5,512 children of predominantly Hispanic heritage and from families experiencing low socioeconomic circumstances. A series of between-subjects ANOVAs indicated that age…

By means of the moving window paradigm, we examined how many letters can be identified during a single eye fixation and whether this letter identity span changes as a function of reading skill. The results revealed that 8-year-old Finnish readers identify approximately 5 characters, 10-year-old readers identify approximately 7 characters, and…

Calculation fluency weaknesses are a key characteristic of children with mathematics difficulties. The major aim of this dissertation was to uncover early predictors of calculation fluency weaknesses in second graders. Children's performance on number sense tasks in kindergarten along with general cognitive abilities, early literacy skills, and…

To date, a number of studies have demonstrated the existence of mismatches between children's "implicit" and "explicit" knowledge at certain points in development that become manifest by their gestures and gaze orientation in different problem solving contexts. Stimulated by this research, we used eye movement measurement to…