The associations between vocabulary growth and reading development were examined longitudinally for a representative sample of Dutch children throughout the elementary school period. Data on basic and advanced vocabulary, word decoding, and reading comprehension were collected across the different grades. The results showed significant progress on…

Despite its importance in social development, social understanding has hardly been studied in high-ability children. This study explores differences in social understanding between children in high-ability and regular classrooms, specifically theory of mind (ToM) and perception accuracy, as well as associations between individual characteristics…

This study addresses the convergent validity of a new teacher questionnaire to assess the social participation of students with special needs in regular primary schools. The Social Participation Questionnaire (SPQ) consists of four subscales representing four key themes of social participation: friendships/relationships, contacts/interactions,…

This article presents empirical evidence challenging the received wisdom that a nonword-reading deficit is a characteristic trait of disabled readers. On the basis of 2 large-scale empirical studies using the reading-level match design, we argue that a nonword-reading deficit is the consequence of normal developmental differences in word-specific…

In the present study it has been examined how children's creative writing tasks may contribute to teachers' understanding of children's values. Writings of 300 elementary school children about what they would do if they were the boss of The Netherlands were obtained and seemed to reflect different types of values. Most children were concerned with…

The present study examined whether specific item characteristics, such as mode of acquisition (MoA) of word meanings, make reading comprehension tests particularly difficult for deaf children. Reading comprehension data on nearly 13,000 hearing 7-to-12-year-olds and 253 deaf 7-to-20-year-olds were analyzed, divided across test levels from second…