Students' socioeconomic status (SES) is central to much research and policy deliberation on educational inequalities. However, the SES model is under severe stress for several reasons. SES is an ill-defined concept, unlike parental education or family income. SES measures are frequently based on proxy reports from students; these are generally…

A longitudinal study with 45 children (Hispanic, 13%; non-Hispanic, 87%) investigated whether the early production of non-referential beat and flip gestures, as opposed to referential iconic gestures, in parent-child naturalistic interactions from 14 to 58 months old predicts narrative abilities at age 5. Results revealed that only non-referential…

Self-efficacy and spatial anxiety towards geometry are stated to be effective to improve teachers' attitudes towards geometry. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the effect of geometry self-efficacy and spatial anxiety on attitude towards geometry. This determines the extent to which the pre-service primary school teachers' geometry…

Background: Coding has been added to school curricula in several countries, being one of the necessary competencies of the 21st century. Although it has also been suggested to foster the development of several cognitive skills such as computational thinking and problem-solving, studies on the effects of coding are very limited, provide mixed…

In sentences such as "Some dogs are mammals," the literal semantic meaning ("Some 'and possibly all' dogs are mammals") conflicts with the pragmatic meaning ("'Not all' dogs are mammals," known as a "scalar implicature"). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the…

Spatial skills are important for student success in STEM disciplines at the K-12 educational level. Teachers' spatial skills and feelings about completing spatial tasks influence their teaching as well as their students' spatial learning. However, the relation between teachers' spatial skills and their spatial anxiety is not well understood. Here…

The current study examines the organization of attention skills across the preschool year before kindergarten, and tests how distinct attention subcomponents predict early academic skills in a sample of low-income children (n = 99). Children completed well-validated attention tasks in fall at 4.5 years old and spring at 5 years old, capturing the…

Understanding how pre-literate children's language abilities and neural function relate to future reading ability is important for identifying children who may be at-risk for reading problems. Pre-literate children are already proficient users of spoken language and their developing brain networks for language become highly overlapping with brain…

Background: Linguistic comprehension and narrative skills encapsulate a complex array of grammatical and semantic skills that underpin complex reading comprehension processes. However, most research in this area has focused on children with reading difficulties and not on typically developing children. Also the research has mostly focused on…

Past work investigating spatial cognition suggests better mental rotation abilities for those who are fluent in a signed language. However, no prior work has assessed whether fluency is needed to achieve this performance benefit or what it may look like on the neurobiological level. We conducted an electroencephalography experiment and assessed…

In this article, we examine spatial inscriptions marked in real or rendered spaces, rather than on two-dimensional surfaces, conceptualize spatial inscriptions from an inclusive materialist perspective and consider realizations of spatial inscriptions that are possible with emerging technologies (e.g. 3D pens, immersive virtual reality). We then…

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 2011, documented that seventy-three percent of students in grades 4th thru 12th are performing below the proficiency level for writing in the United States. Writing in the 21st century has become an essential part of middle and high schools' students' curriculum (NAEP, 2011). In order for…

We propose an adaptation of the Glicko-2 rating system in a K-12 math learning software setting, where variable time intervals between solution attempts and the stratification of student-item pairings by grade levels necessitate modification of the original model. The discrete-time stochastic process underlying the original system has been…

Spatial reasoning is seen as increasingly important in STEM fields. Within mathematics, geometry is a potential site to study and support young children's spatial reasoning. In this paper we revisit Piaget and his colleagues' theoretical perspective on children's development of geometry concepts and take note of projective geometry in that theory.…

Reading is a complex task that requires integration of information across brain systems that support sensory, language and cognitive processing. Individuals vary widely in reading ability: some read almost effortlessly, while others struggle to make sense of printed text. Factors at multiple levels from genes and brain through environment…