Social communication and executive functioning challenges as well as co-occurring anxiety/depression may make acquiring the skills needed to manage daily life tasks difficult for diploma-track autistic youth, thus limiting their participation in adult roles. This study describes the associations between executive function, social communication…

Children learning two languages (Dual Language Learners; DLLs) represent a rapidly growing population in the United States. DLLs are disproportionately more likely to live in families of low socioeconomic status (SES), which places many of them at risk for poor dual-language outcomes. To date, most studies on SES and dual language development have…

The present study examined whether teacher-child closeness and conflict across kindergarten and first grade varied by gender and disruptive behavior at kindergarten entry within a sample of 324 predominantly Black children from low-income, urban households. Three main findings emerged from the analyses. First, contrary to findings from previous…

Reading motivation is a critical contributor to reading achievement and has the potential to influence its development. Educators, researchers, and evaluators need to select the best reading motivation scales for their research and classroom. The goals of this review were to identify a set of reading motivation student self-report scales used in…

We examined whether students were accurate in predicting their test performance two testing contexts (low-stakes and high-stakes). The sample comprised U.S. high school students enrolled in an advanced placement (AP) statistics course during the 2017-2018 academic year (N=209; M[subscript age]=16.6 years). We found that even two months before…

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…

We examined the functions of mothers' speech to infants during two tasks--book-sharing and bead-stringing--in low-income, ethnically diverse families. Mexican, Dominican, and African American mothers and their infants were video-recorded sharing wordless books and toy beads in the home when infants were 1:2 and 2:0. Mothers' utterances were…

Research suggests that gains in executive function (EF) skills training are strongest when task difficulty increases progressively, yet findings on the effectiveness of adaptive approaches for EF training are inconsistent. This study compared the effectiveness of an adaptive vs a non-adaptive version of a digital game designed to train the EF…

Background: The importance of reading motivation has led to the development of a large number of self-report reading motivation measures; however, there is still a need for a usable measure of adolescent reading motivation that captures a large number of theoretically and empirically distinct constructs. Methods: The current paper details the…

Algebra I is a crucial course for middle and high school students for successful STEM related coursework. A key issue is whether students should take Algebra I in 8th versus 9th grade. Large-scale policy studies show conflicting results, and there are few (particularly longitudinal) individual difference studies. Here, 53 students were assessed in…

Background: Evidence of the positive effects of school physical activity (PA) interventions, including classroom-based PA (CBPA), is rapidly growing. However, few studies examine how variations in scheduled PA opportunities and teacher-implemented CBPA affect students' PA outcomes. Methods: Teachers at five elementary schools attended training on…

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate highly variable writing skills. Few studies have examined if engagement during writing assessments may differ for children with ASD and if task engagement is related to their writing assessment performance. This study examined narrative writing and broad task engagement in…

Researchers have identified sources of individual differences in writing across beginning and developing writers. The aim of the present study was to further clarify the sources of this variability by investigating the extent to which there are differences in genetic and environmental factors underlying the associations between lexical diversity,…

This study explored transactional associations among visuomotor integration, attention, fine motor coordination, and mathematics skills in a diverse sample of one hundred thirty-five 5-year-olds (kindergarteners) and one hundred nineteen 6-year-olds (first graders) in the United States who were followed over the course of 2 school years.…

Purpose: Most educational assessments tend to be constructed in a close-ended format, which is easier to score consistently and more affordable. However, recent work has leveraged computation text methods from the information sciences to make open-ended measurement more effective and reliable for older students. This study asks whether such text…