Background: Visual-spatial attention is associated with reading development, but we do not know whether this is primarily driven by the deployment of goal-directed or stimulus-driven attention. Method: One hundred ninety-four Chinese-speaking first graders completed two visual search tasks, in which they searched for a target among a number of…

Children's ability to discriminate nonsymbolic number (e.g., the number of items in a set) is a commonly studied predictor of later math skills. Number discrimination improves throughout development, but what drives this improvement is unclear. Competing theories suggest that it may be due to a sharpening numerical representation or an improved…

There are two lines of discussion regarding the function of the Approximate Number System (ANS). The first line focuses on the extent to which visual cues affect the estimation of numerosity. The second line investigates the extent to which ANS precision is associated with symbolic math performance. The current study combined these two lines of…

A pretest-training-posttest design assessed whether training to improve spatial skills also improved mathematics performance in elementary-aged children. First grade students (mean age = 7 years, n = 134) and sixth grade students (mean age = 12 years, n = 124) completed training in 1 of 2 spatial skills--spatial visualization or form…

Schooling may shape children's abilities to control their attention, but it is unclear if this impact extends from control over visual objects to encompass multisensory objects, which are more typical of everyday environments. We compared children across three primary school grades (Swiss first, third, and fifth grades) on their performance on a…

Several mental health programs have been developed in clinics and transported into schools, which has great potential for increasing access to intervention for students who may not be otherwise served. However, such programs may lack consideration of the complexity and constraints of schools, including the diversity of student needs and…

In this article, the authors describe the Japanese term "bansho," which refers to the intentional use of board space for facilitating student learning. Bansho offers a structure for sequencing mathematics visually on the board. By purposefully organizing the board space alongside the lesson, teachers can provide students with a framework…

Reading in alphabetic orthography requires analysis and recognition of specific attributes of visual stimuli, and generation, reactivation, and use of mental images of letters and words. This study evaluated the role of visual analysis and mental imagery in reading performances of students at different stages of reading acquisition. Reading…

Antecedent interventions are often used preventatively to address engagement, but few studies have evaluated their effectiveness with students at risk for disability. This study evaluated the effectiveness of two commonly recommended antecedent interventions that have limited empirical support for use with students at risk: social stories and…

Strategic Incremental Rehearsal (SIR) is a recently developed flashcard intervention that blends Traditional Drill with Incremental Rehearsal (IR) for teaching sight words. The initial study evaluating SIR found it was more effective than IR for teaching sight words to first-grade students. However, that study failed to assess efficiency, which is…

The importance of practical learning environments for developing preservice teachers' (PSTs') dispositions and skills for teaching mathematics is underscored in a growing body of literature. Hence, teacher preparation programs often include methods courses embedded within K-12 schools. Utilized to a lesser extent; however, are campus-based…

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…

Assistive technology enables young children with disabilities to more effectively access their environment, facilitating the development of social-emotional, communicative, and cognitive skills. Research indicates that when service providers make decisions about assistive technology, they are more likely to choose low-tech options over high-tech…

This research was designed to investigate the effectiveness of using the think-aloud strategy to improve the reading comprehension in the content area of science. Based on state standards assessments, many early elementary grade students who were considered fluent readers struggled with evaluative science comprehension. In this quasi-experimental…

Two studies examined children's map construction skills when drawing demands were removed from the task and scenes were highly simplified. Study 1 compared the performance of first graders and third graders on their ability to preserve configuration during transformation of pictured arrays from eye-level to aerial views. For children with…