The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the contributions of social, academic, and psychological characteristics of peer groups to individual development in the same and different domains in Chinese children. Participants included 1,864 elementary school students (945 boys, M[subscript age] = 11 years) in China. One-year…

The idea of Matthew effects in reading--the widening achievement gap between good and poor reader--has attracted considerable attention in education research in the past 25 years. Despite the popularity of the topic, however, empirical studies that have analyzed the core assumption of Matthew effects in reading have produced inconsistent results.…

The goal of the present study was to test opposing views about 4 issues concerning predictors of individual differences in Chinese written composition: (a) whether morphological awareness, syntactic processing, and working memory represent distinct and measureable constructs in Chinese or are just manifestations of general language ability; (b)…

We are delighted to welcome you to the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2017, taking place in Budapest, Hungary, from 29 of April to 1 of May, 2017. Modern psychology offers a large range of scientific fields where it can be applied. The goal of understanding individuals and groups (mental functions and…

Results indicate that children who witness teachers' appraisal actions interpret some of them differently at different ages. Participants were 136 first through sixth graders who were assessed on measures of perceptions of target children and perceptions of teacher's opinions of target children. (RH)

The authors examined developmental and individual differences in pure numerical estimation, the type of estimation that depends solely on knowledge of numbers. Children between kindergarten and 4th grade were asked to solve 4 types of numerical estimation problems: computational, numerosity, measurement, and number line. In Experiment 1,…

Nonword spellings were obtained from children in kindergarten through third grade in a study of the development of young children's phonological and orthographic knowledge. Results indicated that young children's nonword spellings reflected the joint influences of linguistic knowledge and psychological processes. (GLR)

Many educational questions of research interest focus on individual differences in attitudes and behaviors related to academic achievement, changes in such attitudes and behaviors over time, and the types of academic environments that facilitate or prevent development of achievement attitudes and behaviors at school. This paper, the first in a…

Sentence Verification Technique tests were administered to 151 third and fourth graders on 3 occasions over a school year. Results indicate that reading and listening comprehension can be measured with the tests and that the 2 comprehension modalities develop independently, with reading comprehension being more sensitive to instruction. (TJH)

Examined preschoolers' and second and fifth graders' development of two types of perspective taking: (1) perspective taking based on differences in the information available to two people; and (2) perspective taking based on differences in weighting the same information. (RH)

The primary goal of this study was to assess the ability of maltreated school-age children and adolescents to understand the thoughts, feelings, and points of view of others. Level of egocentrism and social perspective-taking coordination were assessed in a group of 49 maltreated and 49 demographically matched nonmaltreated children. Twenty-six…

Examined relations between phonological processing and emerging individual differences in math computation skills. Found that phonological memory, access rate to phonological codes in memory, and phonological awareness were uniquely associated with growth in number of computation procedures mastered from 92.5 to 134.8 months. Phonological…

In this study an attempt was made to obtain a developmental dimension for estimating longitudinal development on the basis of cross-sectional data. To check the validity of this approach, the cross-sectional data were compared with true longitudinal data. Forty-three public school children were given a series of conservation tasks in four…

An account of one first grader's growth in writing and how his steady progress toward competence changed the way his teacher evaluated all children's writing growth. Chronicles the teacher's developing professional growth as she learned to look for the things mastered instead of the things still not understood. (ET)