Engaging in frequent, meaningful conversation during the early years of schooling is foundational for children's literacy development. Specifically, developing oral language through daily conversations is essential for language comprehension, and eventually, reading comprehension. In this article, we discuss how teachers can use the…

Objective: Some children and adolescents who have experienced bullying victimization may also be perpetrators, while others may defend their peers, although moderators of these relationships have rarely been examined. The current study examined the potential moderating effects of affective and cognitive empathy in the relationship between bullying…

Visual displays, such as illustrated web pages, animations, and simulations, can both aid and pose challenges for learners. The first generation of educational research on visuals focused on the basic processes underlying comprehension. A second generation of research tested various instructional supports for visual displays, and this research was…

Children are on a quest for knowledge. To achieve it, children must integrate separate but related episodes of learning. The theoretical model of memory integration posits that the process is supported by component cognitive abilities. In turn, memory integration predicts accumulation of a knowledge base. We tested this model in two studies (data…

With a focus on within-person effects, this study investigated mutualism among academic skills (reading, math, science) and between those skills and verbal working memory in a general population sample and groups with high or low skills from Grades 2 to 5 (2010-2016, N = 859-9040, age 6.27-13.13 years, 49% female, ethnically diverse). Mutualism…

Children's preschool experiences have consequences for development. However, it is not clear how children's real-time interactions with peers affect their language development; nor is it clear whether these processes differ between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and two other groups of children, those with general developmental…

The present study validates a new procedure that combines continuous measures of proximity (Ubisense) and vocalization (LENA) into measures of peer social interaction. The data were collected from 4 boys and 5 girls (ages 2-3 at the outset) on 8 separate days (3-4 hours per day) over the course of an academic year. Teacher reports of friendship…

It is well established that gesture facilitates learning, but understanding the best way to harness gesture and "how" gesture helps learners are still open questions. Here, we consider one of the properties that may make gesture a powerful teaching tool: its temporal alignment with spoken language. Previous work shows that the…

Teen dating violence victimization is associated with a host of adverse mental and physical health problems. A number of bystander-focused interventions have been developed to mitigate the occurrence of abuse but with varying effectiveness. There remains a need to understand more about bystander behaviors used by adolescents to ensure that…

Proof, though central to mathematical practice, is rarely explored through the lens of embodiment because of the centrality of abstraction and generalization. We use the case of a high school geometry student to investigate two research questions: (1) How do embodied processes facilitate mathematical learning? (2) How can generalized mathematical…

It is unknown whether sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) is prospectively associated with depression in adolescence, and possible processes linking SCT to depression remain unexamined. Using a longitudinal study with three timepoints over a two-year period, the current study tested the indirect effects of SCT on depression via peer victimization,…

Spelling has been identified as a key transcription skill that emerges during the elementary years as students learn how to write and subsequently develop fluency with writing (McCutchen, 1996), making the assessment of spelling a critical component of evaluation systems within schools. This includes the use of curriculum-based measures of writing…

Objectives: Increased listening effort in school-age children with hearing loss (CHL) could compromise learning and academic achievement. Identifying a sensitive behavioral measure of listening effort for this group could have both clinical and research value. This study examined the effects of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), hearing loss, and…

Higher-order thinking is relational reasoning in which multiple representations are linked together, through inferences, comparisons, abstractions, and hierarchies. We examine the development of higher-order thinking in 64 preschool-aged children, observed from 14 to 58 months in naturalistic situations at home. We used children's spontaneous talk…

Classroom organization is an important facet of prekindergarten quality but is typically measured at a "global level" and as a "single construct." Little is known about how experiences of different facets of classroom organization--namely, exposure to teacher organizational strategies--vary across "individual…