The development of two-digit number processing in children, and in particular the influence of place-value understanding, has recently received increasing research interest. However, place-value influences leading to decomposed processing have not yet been investigated for multi-digit numbers beyond the two-digit number range in children.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the contribution of PASS (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive) processes to Chinese reading accuracy and fluency. One-hundred-forty Grade 3 to 5 Mandarin-speaking children were assessed on measures of PASS processes, phonological awareness, and orthographic knowledge. A year later they were…

The representation of numerical and non-numerical ordered sequences was investigated in children from preschool to grade 3. The child's conception of how sequence items map onto a spatial scale was tested using the Number-to-Position task (Siegler & Opfer, 2003) and new variants of the task designed to probe the representation of the alphabet…

The relation between skill in simple addition and subtraction and more general math achievement in elementary school is well established but not understood. Both the intrinsic importance of skill in simple calculation for math and the influence of conceptual knowledge and cognitive factors (working memory, processing speed, oral language) on…

Research Findings: This article describes major theories and research on math cognition across the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and education and connects these literatures to intervention practices. Commercially available math intervention programs were identified and evaluated using the following questions: (a) Did neuroscience…

This contribution explains the connection between spatial intelligence and spatial competences and by indicating how the first is the cognitive matrix of abilities necessary to move in space as well as to represent it. Indeed, two are principal factors involved in the spatial intelligence: orientation and representation. Both are based on a close…

There is mounting research evidence that contests the metaphysical perspective of knowing as mental process detached from the physical world. Yet education, especially in its teaching and learning practices, continues to treat knowledge as something that is necessarily and solely expressed in ideal verbal form. This study is part of a funded…

This study investigated whether instruction that involves comparing the equal sign with other relational symbols is more effective at imparting a relational interpretation of the equal sign than instruction about the equal sign alone. Third- and fourth-grade students in a comparing symbols group learned about the greater than, less than, and equal…

Evidence suggests that sensitivity to coherent motion (CM) is related to reading, but its role in the etiology of developmental dyslexia remains unclear. In this longitudinal study, CM sensitivity was measured in 31 children at family risk for dyslexia and 31 low-risk controls. Children, diagnosed with dyslexia in third grade (mean age = 8 years 3…

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…

The objectives of the present study were twofold: (a) to explore the interrelationship among distal, proximal cognitive skills, and word reading; and (b) to identify those cognitive processes that predict phonological awareness and rapid naming. Seventy First-Nation Canadian children attending grades 3 and 4 were examined on phonological…

Children (n = 122) and adults (n = 200) with dyslexia completed rapid automatic naming (RAN) letters, rapid automatic switching (RAS) letters and numbers, executive function (inhibition, verbal fluency), and phonological working memory tasks. Typically developing 3rd (n = 117) and 5th (n = 103) graders completed the RAS task. Instead of analyzing…

We propose that researchers should utilize ratio scores when examining the response styles theory rather than examine each of the response styles separately. Higher ratio scores indicate a higher probability of engaging in ruminative, as opposed to distracting and problem solving, behaviors. In Phase One, we examined the factor structure and…

The role of information processing deficits in poor readers of nonalphabetic scripts such as Chinese is not well documented. Here, we examined perceptual processing in good and poor readers of Chinese. Specifically, two groups of third grade children comprising 20 "good readers" and 19 "poor readers," drawn from a larger pool of 254 students, were…

The development and use of item shells in the construction of a series of standardized tests of reading comprehension at the elementary school level are described. An item shell is an item that is devoid of specific content, but contains key words and a distinctive syntactic structure. The specific content of the item shell varies depending on the…