Many studies demonstrate that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Yet, it is unclear to what extent statistical learning is involved in more naturalistic settings, when young children have to acquire meaningful grammatical elements. In the present study, we address these points, by…

Recent research has demonstrated that, when instructed to prioritize a serial position in visual working memory (WM), adults are able to boost performance for this selected item, at a cost to nonprioritized items (e.g., Hu, Hitch, Baddeley, Zhang, & Allen, 2014). While executive control appears to play an important role in this ability, the…

Purpose: A large pool of evidence supports the beneficial effect of an external focus of attention on motor skill performance in adults. In children, this effect has been studied less and results are inconclusive. Importantly, individual differences are often not taken into account. We investigated the role of working memory, conscious motor…

Educational agents (including animal companions) are a kind of interface agent, which is a significant component in educational systems, and has great impacts on student learning. However, with the development of emerging technologies (e.g., tangible technology), few studies have yet investigated how tangible technology can be used to combine with…

Elementary students spend an average of five and a quarter hours per day seated on a hard surface which provides little sensory input and possibly contributes to discomfort. Sensory integration was found to improve executive functioning skills in elementary students by helping their comfort level at being seated. This quasi-experimental study…

Paying attention is a critical first step toward learning. For children in primary school classrooms there can be many things to attend to other than the focus of a lesson, such as visual displays on classroom walls. The aim of this study was to use eye-tracking techniques to explore the impact of visual displays on attention and learning for…

Becoming an elite official of any sport takes time and experience. Fortunately, an opportunity exists for learning the role of a referee at an earlier time. The role of a referee may be taught to students in physical education classes through the sport education pedagogical model. Previous research of sport education has shown that young students…

Internationally, girls outperform boys in overall school performance. The gender gap is particularly large among those in at-risk groups, such as children from families at economic disadvantage. This study modeled the academic trajectories of a low-income sample of boys and girls from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project across the full course…

We investigated how young language learners process their responses on and perceive a computer-mediated, timed speaking test. Twenty 8-, 9-, and 10-year-old non-native English-speaking children (NNSs) and eight same-aged, native English-speaking children (NSs) completed seven computerized sample TOEFL® Primary™ speaking test tasks. We investigated…

The aim of the present research is to assess the developmental pattern of the metacognitive knowledge of attention in Italian primary school students. Data were collected from 95 pupils divided into two age groups: the first (6-8 years) and second primary school cycles (8-10 years). The children were asked to perform two specific thematic drawings…

This paper reports results from a large-scale observational study investigating attention allocation during instructional activities in elementary school students (kindergarten through fourth-grade). In Study 1, 22 classrooms participated while a more diverse sample of 30 classrooms participated in Study 2. This work investigated temporal patterns…

The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between executive functions and mathematical abilities to determine the contribution of these functions to math performance. In this study, 30 students were selected from among 4th graders of elementary school, in two groups with low achievement in mathematics (poor) and high achievement…

A number of authors have suggested that attention control may be a suitable target for cognitive training in children with autism spectrum disorder. This study provided the first evidence of the feasibility of such training using a battery of tasks intended to target visual attentional control in children with autism spectrum disorder within…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

A group of 50 skilled readers and a group of 50 less-skilled readers of Grade 5 matched for age and intelligence and selected on the basis of their proficiency in reading comprehension were tested for their competence in word reading and the processes of attention, simultaneous coding, successive coding and planning at three levels, i.e.,…