Purpose: Having a clear understanding of the types and amounts of classroom literacy learning opportunities is important for contextualizing children's early literacy performance. In this study, we examine the content, context, and management of literacy learning opportunities in a large, geographically diverse sample in the United States. We also…

Research Findings: The amount of time and type of program that children experience in early childhood settings may be associated with children's kindergarten-entry skills, or kindergarten readiness. Taking a person-centered perspective, in the present study, we examined the extent to which reliable and unique profiles of early childhood…

Three experiments examined whether the experience of individuating an object would affect the way that children of different ages would interpret its label. Participants were asked to remember a novel object and pick it out from sets containing either two similar objects (similar condition) or no similar objects (dissimilar condition). They were…

Research has consistently shown memory is enhanced when learning combines test trials with study trials compared with study trials alone (i.e., testing effect). However, the majority of work on testing effects has involved undergraduate students. In the current experiment, the authors examined testing effects in 2 groups of elementary school…

The purpose of this study was to empirically examine the dimensionality of language ability for young children (4-8 years) from prekindergarten to third grade (n = 915), theorizing that measures of vocabulary and grammar ability will represent a unitary trait across these ages, and to determine whether discourse skills represent an additional…