Using a longitudinal mediation framework and a low-income sample, this study had 2 aims: (a) to model bidirectional associations between parent academic expectations and child academic outcomes from first through fifth grade, and (b) to explore 3 mediators of parental influence: parent involvement in child schooling, child learning behaviors, and…

We investigated links between persuasive behavior and theory of mind (ToM) understanding using a novel naturalistic peer persuasion task in which children were invited to convince an interactive puppet to eat raw broccoli or brush his teeth. Sixty-three 3- to 8-year-olds (M age = 6 years, 6 months) took part in the persuasion task and were also…

Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children's information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children…

This study explored how nonpromotional school changes, a potentially major event for children, were associated with 3 forms of social maladjustment: isolation/withdrawal, affiliation with maladjusted peers, and aggression toward peers. Given that school mobility frequently co-occurs with family transitions, the moderating role of these transitions…

Adolescents become increasingly sensitive to social evaluation. Some previous studies have related this change to pubertal development. The present longitudinal study examined the role of sociocognitive development. We investigated whether or not the transition to recursive thinking, the ability to think about (others') thoughts, would be…

Early reading abilities are widely considered to derive in part from statistical learning of regularities between letters and sounds. Although there is substantial evidence from laboratory work to support this, how it occurs in the classroom setting has not been extensively explored; there are few investigations of how statistics among letters and…

Following a large, diverse sample of 4,096 children in 27 schools, this study evaluated the impact of 3 aspects of peer relations, measured concurrently, on subsequent child aggressive-disruptive behavior during early elementary school: peer dislike, reciprocated friends' aggressiveness, and classroom levels of aggressive-disruptive behavior.…

The present study examined the early parenting and temperament determinants of children's antisocial and positive behaviors in a low-income, diverse ethno-racial sample. Participants were from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, which included 960 European American (initial M age = 15.00 months; 51.2% female) and 880 African…

Sparse research suggests that children's social information processing has links not just with aggressive behavior but also with children's prosocial behavior (e.g., Nelson & Crick, 1999). However, the past work that has been done has not been longitudinal, so the direction of links between social information processing and prosocial…

The present study addressed whether developmental improvement in working memory span task performance relies upon a growing ability to proactively plan response sequences during childhood. Two hundred thirteen children completed a working memory span task in which they used a touchscreen to reproduce orally presented sequences of animal names.…

Conceptualizations of developmental trends are driven by the particular method used to analyze the period of change of interest. Various techniques exist to analyze developmental data, including individual growth curve analysis in observed and latent frameworks, cross-lagged regression to assess interrelations among variables, and multilevel…

Group decision making should be particularly beneficial when group members share unique information, because then a group can make a better decision than each group member alone. This study examined how elementary-school children share unique information during group decision making. Seventy-nine groups of 3 same-sex and same-age 7- and 9-year-old…

Asking children to gesture while being taught a concept facilitates their learning. Here, we investigated whether children benefitted equally from producing gestures that reflected speech (speech-gesture matches) versus gestures that complemented speech (speech-gesture mismatches), when learning the concept of palindromes. As in previous studies,…

This research examined whether following social and physical aggression trajectories across Grades 3-12 predicted psychological maladjustment. Teachers rated participants' (n = 287, 138 boys) aggressive behavior at the end of each school year. Following the 12th grade, psychosocial outcomes were measured: rule-breaking behaviors, internalizing…

Social responsibility can be defined as a set of prosocial values representing personal commitments to contribute to community and society. Little is known about developmental change--and predictors of that change--in social responsibility during adolescence. The present study used an accelerated longitudinal research design to investigate the…