Childhood adversity can lead to cognitive deficits or enhancements, depending on many factors. Though progress has been made, two challenges prevent us from integrating and better understanding these patterns. First, studies commonly use and interpret raw performance differences, such as response times, which conflate different stages of cognitive…

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…

There is good evidence for an association between poor reading and anxiety, but the mechanisms responsible for this association are currently unknown. In this study, we used structural equation modeling of four large longitudinal databases from the United Kingdom (n = 7,870), the United States (ns = 8,001 and 7,160), and Australia (n = 768) to…

The Neurosequential Model in Education (NME) is described as a developmentally sensitive and biologically respectful approach to development and learning. This paper postulates that the NME shares many commonalities with the Montessori Method in that it, too, is developmentally sensitive and adheres to biologically respectful concepts. This paper…

Conceptualizing both economic well-being (EWB) and children's development as multidimensional constructs, the present study examines their association using bioecological developmental theory and structural equation modeling with Zulu children (ages 7-10) in KwaZulu-Natal, a highly impoverished region of South Africa (N = 1,958). Relative EWB…

Learning constitutes a main developmental context for children everywhere. Learning-related emotions can affect cognition, motivation, and achievement and are associated with parenting. Studies on learning-related emotions and how parenting is associated with a child's emotional development in learning have been less conclusive for Chinese…

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…

Young children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size--they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children's action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional…

In recent years, an increased interest in the importance of children's ability to regulate emotions in socially adaptive ways has driven considerable research on the development of emotion regulation. A widely studied emotion regulation strategy known as "expressive suppression" (ES), in which a person attempts to conceal…

Classroom quality measures, such as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, Revised (ECERS-R), are widely used in research, practice, and policy. Increasingly, these uses have been for purposes not originally intended, such as contributing to consequential policy decisions. The current study adds to the recent evidence of problems with the…

Classroom quality measures, such as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, Revised (ECERS-R), are widely used in research, practice, and policy. Increasingly, these uses have been for purposes not originally intended, such as contributing to consequential policy decisions. The current study adds to recent evidence of problems with the…

The purpose of this review was to introduce readers of "Child Development" to the meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) technique. Provided are a background to the MASEM approach, a discussion of its utility in the study of child development, and an application of this technique in the study of reading comprehension (RC)…

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated…

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…

Nordic welfare states have been very successful at reducing poverty and inequality among their citizens. However, the presence of a strong social safety net in these countries has not solved the problem of "socioeconomic exclusion", manifesting in such outcomes as chronic unemployment and welfare dependency. In an effort to understand…