Examining the dimensionality of oral discourse language skills in early childhood is crucial in informing theories of language and literacy development. This study examined the factor structure of linguistic and discourse features in oral text production for second graders. A total of 330 English-speaking second graders (M[subscript age] = 7.33,…

We center the voice of Dwyan Moore, a Black 12-year-old boy, during his transition of being diagnosed with a learning dis/Ability. We do so to grapple with the problem of disproportionate representation in special education along race and dis/Ability, with particular attention to educational leadership. Disproportionate representation is a…

Understanding others' perspectives and integrating this knowledge in social interactions is challenging for young children; even adults struggle with this skill. While young children show the capacity to understand what others can and cannot see under supportive laboratory conditions, more research is necessary to understand how children implement…

Performance on a range of spatial and mathematics tasks was measured in a sample of 1592 students in kindergarten, third grade, and sixth grade. In a previously published analysis of these data, performance was analyzed by grade only. In the present analyses, we examined whether the relations between spatial skill and mathematics skill differed…

Theory of mind is the understanding that other people have mental states that drive their actions and that those mental states can be different from one's own. Without understanding theory of mind and being able to take others' perspectives, it could be difficult for children to read and understand narrative texts. This paper posits that…

This study examined the extent of perspective taking and language features represented in secondary students' text-based analytical writing. We investigated (1) whether perspective taking is related to writing quality, accounting for language features in writing; (2) whether students' English learner status is related to perspectives represented…

Though argumentative writing is a vital skill across diverse content areas and domains, most U.S. students perform below grade level in writing, and teachers are often unprepared to address this shortfall because their training approaches writing as a subspecialty of reading rather than its own unique discipline. Writing instruction and assessment…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties and measurement invariance of a web-based, self-administered battery of assessments of social-emotional comprehension called "SELweb." Assessment modules measured children's ability to read facial expressions, infer others' perspectives, solve social problems, delay…

This paper shares ideas with teachers about the integration of students' social and emotional skills with science instruction to fully implement the Next Generation Science Standards. In this article, we share a sequence of lessons that teachers thought were especially useful to produce effective science discourse and promote student…

Purpose: Children's ability to adjust one's language according to discourse context is important for success in academic settings. This study examined whether second graders vary in linguistic and discourse features depending on discourse contexts, that is, when describing pictures in contextualized (describing the picture to an examiner while…

Perspective taking, one's knowledge of their own mental and emotional states and inferences about others' mental and emotional states, is an important skill for writing development. In the present study, we examined how perspective taking is expressed in writing and how it is related to overall writing quality. We analyzed seventh graders'…

In early childhood, family engagement includes home- and school-based participation of families in their children's learning, with the goal of building genuine and collaborative partnerships between educators and families (NASEM 2016). While the expectation is that family-school collaborations are ongoing and on multiple levels, family-educator…

We investigated the contributions of multiple strands of factors--individual characteristics (struggling reader status, working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, knowledge-based inference, theory of mind, comprehension monitoring), a text feature (narrative vs. expository genre), and question types (literal and inferential)--to one's…

The authors propose an integrative theoretical model of reading called the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER) that builds on and extends several prominent theoretical models of reading. According to DIER, the following skills and knowledge are involved in reading comprehension: word reading, listening comprehension, text reading…

We investigated 2 hypotheses of a recently proposed integrative theoretical model of reading, the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER; Kim, 2017b, 2019): (a) hierarchical relations and (b) dynamic relations (or differential relations) of skills to reading comprehension. Students were assessed on reading comprehension, word reading,…