Although students' affects and behaviors in achievement situations have been shown to be influenced by their previous learning experiences, less is known about how they relate to students' dispositional characteristics, such as temperament. This study examined to what extent children's temperament is related to their affective and behavioral…

Theories of psychology and mathematics education recommend two instructional approaches to develop students' mental representations of number: The "exact" approach focuses on the development of exact representations of organized dot patterns; the "approximate" approach focuses on the approximate representation of analogue magnitudes. This study…

Using structural equation modeling with a population-based cohort of French-speaking children from Quebec (Canada), prospective associations were made between two previously established factors underlying student performance--classroom engagement and the teacher-student relations. Our results show developmental continuity in classroom engagement…

In the present study we examined the processing demands of three reading comprehension tests, namely the Woodcock-Johnson Passage Comprehension (WJPC), a Curriculum-Based Measure test (CBM-Maze), and a Recall test, in the early elementary years. Our investigation was theoretically motivated by Perfetti's Verbal Efficiency Theory and examined the…

A sample of 170 Italian children was assessed for reading accuracy, reading speed, text comprehension and spelling in Grades 1 and 3 in order to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal relationships among literacy skills. Main results from multivariate analyses (regression, discriminant and path analyses) indicated that reading speed was the…

This study examined the role of a supportive classroom climate, class size, and length of teaching experience as protective factors against children's peer rejection. A total of 376 children were assessed in kindergarten for risk for reading disabilities (RD) and rated by their teachers on socially withdrawn and disruptive behaviors. The grade 1…

This longitudinal study investigated the cross-lagged associations between children's academic skill development, task-avoidant behaviour in the context of homework, and parental beliefs about their child's success from kindergarten to Grade 2. The participants were 1267 children. The children's pre-skills were assessed at the end of the…

We examined the applicability of the Home Literacy Model in an orthographically transparent language (Greek). Seventy Greek children were followed from kindergarten until grade 4. In kindergarten they were tested in non-verbal intelligence, vocabulary, phonological sensitivity, rapid naming, and letter knowledge. The parents of the children also…

The acquisition of addition facts was investigated in a practice study. Participants were 103 Grade 1 children who practiced simple addition problems with three different methods: (a) writing down the answer, (b) choosing between two alternative answers, and (c) filling in the second missing addend. On a test with simple addition problems,…

The aim of the present longitudinal study was to investigate factors contributing to mothers' and fathers' teaching of reading and mathematics to their children during kindergarten and Grade 1. It was assumed that mothers' and fathers' teaching during kindergarten would be influenced by their socioeconomic status and their own learning…

This study investigated how Spanish orthographic code complexities influence learning to spell. Word and pseudoword dictation tests were carried out by 208 first- to fourth-grade students. Items included the following orthographic code complexities: digraph, contextual effect, position effect, letter H, inconsistency, and stress mark. The results…

This study aimed at investigating the relations between students' strategic behaviour during problem solving, task performance and domain-specific self-concept. A total of 167 first- and second-graders were individually examined in tasks involving cubes assembly and in academic self-concept in mathematics. Students' cognitive, metacognitive, and…

We studied children's conceptions of the writing process while the complex cognitive activity of writing is carried out through a pictorial representation of the writing process. Sixty children attending Kindergarten, first grade and fourth grade in Bariloche, Argentina, were presented individually with a sequence of four questions about the…

This experiment investigated the effect of the presentation of a globe--the culturally accepted artifact representing the earth--on children's reasoning in elementary astronomy. Forty-four children from grades 1 and 3 were interviewed individually. First, the children were asked to make their own representations of the earth (i.e., drawings and…

This study examined children's reading performance and its developmental trajectories during the first and the second grade. Ninety children were tested five times on word reading and reading comprehension. Qualitatively different groups were identified through cluster analysis: Competent, Technical, and Poor Readers. The results showed that the…