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…

Poor reading has been linked to negative outcomes on a wide range of emotional-behavioural dimensions in children. However, little is known about the time course of these associations. In this study we analyse data from a sample of Finnish children (N = 199; 106 boys) which included measures of reading fluency in grade 1 (age 7 or 8), and…

Executive functions (EF) are domain-general cognitive skills that predict foundational academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. However, less is known about the relation between EFs and science achievement. The nature of this relation might be explained by the theory of mutualism, which states that development is the result of complex and…

Guided by evolutionary-developmental models, this study tested the hypothesis that children's exposure to parental relationship instability, defined by initiation and dissolution of caregiver intimate relationships, has both costs in cognitive impairments and benefits in enhanced learning skills. Participants included 243 mothers and their…

Dual language learner children (DLLs) benefit from early childhood education (ECE) and learning multiple languages, but research has predominantly focused on English monolingual children, with limited insight on the ECE and early development of DLLs. This study investigated whether DLLs' developmental assets assessed at pre-k entry (i.e. English…

This study aimed to test three competing hypotheses concerning the strength of the cross-language relationship in listening comprehension proficiency in emergent bilinguals: Cummins's developmental linguistic interdependence hypothesis, Proctor, August, Snow, and Barr's interdependence continuum hypothesis, and Goodrich, Lonigan, Kleuver, and…

The association between academic self-concept and achievement is assumed to be reciprocal. Typically, the association is analyzed by variants of the classical cross-lagged panel model. Results with more recently developed methodological approaches, for example, the random intercept cross-lagged panel model, its continuous-time implementation, and…

The present study investigated the role of teacher-rated likeability as a mediator of the relation between low academic competence and depressive symptoms in elementary-aged children. Analyses focused on a sample of children at risk for child maltreatment living in Hawaii (n = 380). Structural equation modeling supported the hypothesized negative…

Young children's oral narration typically progresses from telling disordered events to production of well-sequenced stories. To investigate how this development is supported and whether effects of support extend to literacy, 59 mother-child dyads from low-income family backgrounds were studied longitudinally. Maternal verbal input to narration was…

This study explored transactional associations among visuomotor integration, attention, fine motor coordination, and mathematics skills in a diverse sample of one hundred thirty-five 5-year-olds (kindergarteners) and one hundred nineteen 6-year-olds (first graders) in the United States who were followed over the course of 2 school years.…

The role of working memory (WM) in language acquisition has been widely reported in the developmental literature, but few studies have explored the role of sentence recall in the way WM and related linguistic abilities evolve. This study seeks to explore the organization and development of the memory architecture underlying language using a…

The present study examined teacher sensitivity as a potential moderator of the relationship between children's temperament in infancy and their social development in first grade. Using data from the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD), we found that first grade teachers who were sensitive and responsive to students'…

Extant literature suggests that oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors in childhood and adolescence are associated with distinct patterns of psychophysiological functioning, and that individual differences in these patterns have implications for developmental pathways to disorder. Very little is known about the…

The present study followed a sample of first-grade (N = 316, M[subscript age] = 7.05 at first test) through fourth-grade students to evaluate dynamic developmental relations between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Using latent change score modeling, competing models were fit to the repeated measurements of vocabulary knowledge and…

Utilizing a longitudinal sample of Finnish children (ages 6-10), two studies examined how early linguistic (spoken vs. written) and spatial skills predict later development of arithmetic, and whether counting sequence knowledge mediates these associations. In Study 1 (N = 1,880), letter knowledge and spatial visualization, measured in…