This study investigated the direct relationship between home play opportunity and prospective school readiness, and the indirect relationships as mediated through object and social mastery motivation among Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children. Participants were 106 local children (44.4% girls, mean age = 60.0 months) and their parents and…

Despite decades of efforts to address all levels of barriers, promoting technology integration in schools continues to be challenging and one of the most active research areas in teacher education worldwide. There is a need to better understand the factors influencing teachers' intentions to integrate technology. Current models may lack parsimony…

Research has established the link between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's reading development. However, the theoretical mechanisms underlying the association between them have yet to be fully understood. Moreover, few previous studies exploring the mechanisms tapped both first language (L1) and second language (L2) at the same time. In…

Research Findings: This study aims to explore the relationships between Scientific Epistemic Beliefs (SEB), Science Teaching Beliefs (STB) and Science-specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge (Science-PCK) in preservice kindergarten teachers from China. Altogether 987 preservice teachers were randomly sampled from a teacher education institution and…

Background: We examined the component skills of reading comprehension (i.e., letter sound knowledge, syllable reading fluency, decoding fluency, text or oral reading fluency and listening comprehension) and their structural relations using data from three sub-Saharan African languages with transparent orthographies in a multilingual context.…

Background: We examined the component skills of reading comprehension (i.e., letter sound knowledge, syllable reading fluency, decoding fluency, text or oral reading fluency and listening comprehension) and their structural relations using data from three sub-Saharan African languages with transparent orthographies in a multilingual context.…

Research shows that maternal education influences children's academic performance indirectly through the quality of the home environment. In this study, we tested the role of 12 variables within the home environment (e.g., eating meals together, reading for fun at home, number of children's books, watching TV, and bedtime) to help identify those…

In this 3-year longitudinal study, we examined the interplay of children's motivational orientations, spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) and number sequence and arithmetical skills from kindergarten (at age 6) to grade 1 (at age 7). We also examined the direct and indirect contributions of motivation and SFON to the acquisition of…

Background: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is consistently associated with poor school-level outcomes. Although school engagement is recognized as a protective factor associated with increased academic achievement, school retention/completion, and student well-being in the general population, little research has focused on school…

In the present study, the mediating roles of syllable awareness, orthographic knowledge, and vocabulary skills and the moderating role of morpheme family size in the association between morphological awareness and Chinese character reading were investigated with 176 second-grade Hong Kong Chinese children. In the path analyses, the results…

The present study tested a path diagram regarding the contribution of morphological awareness (MA) to early literacy acquisition among Chinese-speaking second graders (N = 123). Three facets of MA were addressed, namely derivational awareness, compound awareness and compound structure awareness. The model aimed to test a theory of causal order…

The study addressed the question of continuity in literacy achievements from kindergarten to first grade among Arabic-speaking children in Israel. We examined (1) how age and family socio-economic status (SES) predict children's literacy skills in kindergarten and (2) how age, SES, and early literacy skills in kindergarten predict literacy…

Background: A fundamental aim of standardized educational assessment is to achieve reliable discrimination between students differing in the knowledge, skills and abilities assessed. However, questions of the purity with which these tests index students' genuine abilities have arisen. Specifically, literacy and numeracy assessments may also engage…

Research Findings: This study investigated the relationships between effortful control and early literacy and mathematics achievement. A total of 181 children (85 girls and 96 boys) from rural China were assessed when they were in Grades 1 and 2. Path analyses controlling for maternal education indicated that effortful control at the beginning of…

It is established that transcription skills (handwriting and spelling) constrain children's writing. Yet, little is known about the mechanism underlying this relationship. This study examined the mediating role of bursts and pauses on the link between transcription skills and writing fluency or text quality. For that, 174 second graders did the…