This paper discusses how primary school students, who are writing together in the context of inquiry learning, explicitly orient to knowing of oneself and others within the peer group. Using Conversation Analysis, we disclose the conversational functions of assertions holding 'I know', 'you know' and 'we know'. First, students position themselves…

Though it is well-established that self-esteem develops from childhood well into old age, little is known about the processes that influence this change, especially among young populations. This international, cross-sequential study examined the development of self-esteem in 1599 second-graders (Age M[subscript T1] = 7.99, SD[subscript T1] = 0.52…

Writing down spoken number words (transcoding) is an ability that is predictive of math performance and related to working memory ability. We analysed these relationships in a large sample of over 25,000 children, from kindergarten to the end of primary school, who solved transcoding items with a computer adaptive system. Furthermore, we…

This study investigated how gifted children with dyslexia might be able to mask literacy problems and the role of possible compensatory mechanisms. The sample consisted of 121 Dutch primary school children that were divided over four groups (typically developing [TD] children, children with dyslexia, gifted children, gifted children with…

To assess the efficacy of guided oral reading as a remedy for low-achieving readers, two experiments were conducted in the early grades of primary school. In the first, poor-reading students were randomly divided between two treatment groups and a control group. In treatment groups, the intervention was delivered one-to-one, either in a repeated…

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…

Dutch children, from the second and fourth grade of primary school, were each given a visual lexical decision test on 210 Dutch monomorphemic words. After removing words not recognized by a majority of the younger group, (lexical) decisions were analysed by mixed-model regression methods to see whether morphological Family Size influenced decision…

Although the transparency of a writing system is hypothesized to systematically influence the cognitive skills associated with reading development, results of cross-language investigations are inconsistent and usually do not address this issue in a developmental context. We therefore investigated the cognitive dynamics of reading fluency of…

In the beginning of the first decade of this century, some highly-publicized extremistic acts of terror occurred. A hostage tragedy in a school in Beslan (North Ossetia) was followed in the Netherlands by the brutal murder of the controversial Dutch filmmaker and newspaper columnist Theo van Gogh, bomb attacks in Bali and Madrid and other acts of…

The present study aimed at testing theoretical predictions of the fuzzy-trace theory about true and false recognition. The effects of semantic relatedness and study opportunity on true and false recognition of words from Deese, Roediger, McDermott lists (J. Deese, 1959; D. R. Read, 1996; H. L. Roediger & K. B. McDermott, 1995) were evaluated…

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…

Background: In preschool and primary education, pupils differ in many abilities and competences (giftedness). Yet mainstream educational practice seems rather homogeneous in providing age-based or grade-class subject matter approaches. Aims: To clarify whether pupils scoring initially at high ability level do develop and attain differently at…

This article describes Everyday Mathematics, a new math education curriculum targeted to kindergarten, first grade, and second grade students in Holland. It will be introduced to third and fourth grades in 2008. The curriculum helps prepare pupils for standardized tests; allows for students to work at their own rate; involves parents in helping…

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…