This study examines young English readers' ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. The participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the United States, comprising 24 monolingual English-speaking (ME) students and 37…

The development of scientific thinking was assessed in 1,581 second, third, and fourth graders (8-, 9-, 10-year-olds) based on a conceptual model that posits developmental progression from naïve to more advanced conceptions. Using a 66-item scale, five components of scientific thinking were addressed, including experimental design, data…

We examined the role child factors on the acquisition and transfer of learning the control of variables strategy (CVS) via instruction or self-discovery. Seventy-six fourth graders and 43 sixth graders were randomly assigned to a group receiving direct CVS instruction or a discovery learning group. Prior to the intervention, cognitive, scientific,…

New findings are presented for children in Grades 1 to 9 who qualified their families for a multigenerational family genetics study of dyslexia (impaired word decoding/spelling) who had either superior verbal reasoning ("n" = 33 at or above 1 2/3 standard deviation, superior or better range; 19% of these children) or average verbal…

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it…

We examined cognitive attributes, attention, and self-efficacy of fourth grade struggling readers who were identified as adequate responders (n = 27), inadequate responders with comprehension only deficits (n = 46), and inadequate responders with comprehension and word reading deficits (n = 52) after receiving a multicomponent reading…

Effective talent-identification procedures minimize the proportion of students whose subsequent performance indicates that they were mistakenly included in or excluded from the program. Classification errors occur when students who were predicted to excel subsequently do not excel or when students who were not predicted to excel do. Using a…