The present paper was written under the auspices of the interdisciplinary research group "Educational Processes, Competence Development, and Selection Decisions at Preschool and Primary School Age (BiKS)" (FOR 543), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The surveys were conceptualised and supervised as part of the developmental…

This study had three goals: (a) assessing the predictive association of externalizing and internalizing behaviors during childhood with sexual onset during early adolescence; (b) examining the interactive link of externalizing and internalizing behaviors with early sexual onset; and (c) investigating the moderating effect of gender in this…

Interpersonal touch has been little studied empirically as an indicator of parent- and peer-child intimacy. Undergraduate students (n = 390) were studied using a questionnaire survey regarding the frequencies of interpersonal touch by father, mother, same-sex peers, and opposite-sex peers during preschool ages, grades 1-3, grades 4-6, and grades…

What is the nature of learning to read Chinese across grade levels? This study tested 199 kindergartners, 172 second graders, and 165 fifth graders on 12 different tasks purportedly tapping constructs representing phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing, and subcharacter processing. Confirmatory factor analyses…

In 4 studies, the authors examined how intuitions about the relative difficulties of the sciences develop. In Study 1, familiar everyday phenomena in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics were pretested in adults, so as to be equally difficult to explain. When participants in kindergarten, Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8, and college were…

Previous studies have found that children have difficulty solving proportional reasoning problems involving discrete units until 10 to 12 years of age, but can solve parallel problems involving continuous quantities by 6 years of age. The present studies examine where children go wrong in processing proportions that involve discrete quantities. A…

Many researchers have described cognitive differences between gifted and average-performing children. Regarding strategy use, the gifted advantage is often associated with differences such as greater knowledge of strategies, quicker problem solving, and the ability to use strategies more appropriately. The current study used microgenetic methods…

A major advance in the field of reading over the past 15 years has been the development and validation of screening measures that can detect with reasonable accuracy those kindergartners and first graders likely to experience difficulty in learning to read. Increasingly, these students now receive additional instructional support during the…

In this three-year longitudinal study, children were asked to choose the "best" strategy for dealing with hypothetical peer provocations and to justify "why" that was their choice at the end of first, second, and third grades. Teachers and parents also rated children's emotional and behavioral problems. Children's justifications were subjected to…