A latent profile analysis approach was used to examine the developmental profiles of task-avoidant behaviour and reading skills in Grades 1 and 2, as well as their antecedents in kindergarten. The participants in this study were 448 children. Four different developmental profiles of task-avoidant behaviour and reading skills were identified. Our…

Research has proven limited working memory skills to be a high risk factor for educational underachievement in mathematics across the primary school years. Less is known, however, about the performance of children with limited working memory skills in early numeracy tasks. The main purpose of the two studies reported in this article is to explore…

Examined how aspects of social-emotional learning (SEL)--specifically, emotion knowledge, emotional and social behaviors, social problem-solving, and self-regulation--clustered to typify groups of children who differ in terms of their motivation to learn, participation in the classroom, and other indices of early school adjustment and academic…

Besides cognitive factors, children's learning at school may be influenced by more dynamic phenomena, such as motivation and achievement-related task-avoidant behavior. The present study examined the developmental dynamics of task-avoidant behavior and math performance from kindergarten to Grade 4. A total of 225 children were tested for their…

This study aims to validate a teacher-report measure of children's task-avoidant behavior, namely the Behavioral Strategy Rating Scale (BSRS), in a sample of 352 Finnish children. In each of the four waves from Kindergarten to Grade 2, teachers rated children's task-avoidant behavior using the BSRS, children completed reading and mathematics…

The present study investigated the role of cognitive and linguistic precursors to early numeracy skills to examine the interrelations between the development of linguistic and numeracy skills. General intelligence, working memory, phonological awareness, grammatical ability, and early numeracy skills were assessed in 75 first (mean age 6.1) and 55…

In this study, the relationship between latent constructs of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) was investigated and related to later measures of reading and spelling in children learning to read in different alphabetic writing systems (i.e., Norwegian/Swedish vs. English). 750 U.S./Australian children and 230…

This longitudinal study examined how children's early numeracy assessed in kindergarten predicts their mathematical performance in the first grade, after controlling for the effects of age, gender, and parents' education. The participants were 212 Finnish children (107 girls and 105 boys). At the time of the first assessment (kindergarten), the…

Counting abilities have been described as determinative precursors for a good development of later arithmetic abilities. Mastery of the stable order, the one-one-correspondence and the cardinality principles can be seen as essential features for the development of counting abilities. Mastery of the counting principles in kindergarten was assessed…

Genetic and environmental influences on early reading and spelling at the end of kindergarten and Grade 1 were compared across three twin samples tested in the United States, Australia, and Scandinavia. Proportions of variance due to genetic influences on kindergarten reading were estimated at 0.84 in Australia, 0.68 in the U.S., and 0.33 in…

This study examined the effectiveness of two tiers of intervention for preventing early reading difficulties among kindergarten children who qualified as at risk of experiencing difficulty in the early stages of learning to read. Participating schools were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: Professional Development for…

A longitudinal study was conducted on 82 children to investigate, firstly the numerical competence of young children and the predictive value of (pre)-numerical tests in kindergarten, and, secondly, whether children's knowledge of the numerical system and representation of the number size is related to their computation and logical knowledge and…