Executive functions (EFs) in early childhood are predictors of later developmental outcomes and school readiness. Much of the research on EFs and their psychosocial correlates has been conducted in high-income, minority world countries, which represent a small and biased portion of children globally. The aim of this study is to examine EFs among…

Children's Approaches to Learning (AtL) represents how children seek learning opportunities in their classrooms. It can include children's persistence, attention, and initiative. It has often been studied using a composite of a teacher-rated scale. However, person-centered approaches may account for heterogeneity in children's learning approaches,…

Despite research demonstrating the importance of mathematics achievement to children's educational success and trajectories, many children enter kindergarten without the foundational mathematics skills needed to succeed (Garcia & Weiss, 2015). Children's executive function (EF) skills and their learning-related behaviors (Anthony & Ogg,…

In this review, a new model that is grounded in information-processing theory is proposed to account for gender differences in spatial ability. The proposed model assumes that the relative strength of working memory, as expressed by the ratio of visuospatial working memory to verbal working memory, influences the type of strategies used on spatial…

Mind wandering--mentation unrelated to one's current activity and surroundings--is a ubiquitous phenomenon, but seemingly competing ideas have been proposed regarding its relation to executive cognitive processes. The control-failure hypothesis postulates that executive processes prevent mind wandering, whereas the global availability hypothesis…