Grapheme and syllable units have been shown to influence the dynamics of handwriting in adults and children, but the influence of morphemes remains to be clarified. We tested the ability of French-speaking adults and fourth and sixth grade children to process the morphological structure of words during writing. They were asked to copy three types…

Growth in working memory capacity, the number of items kept active in mind, is thought to be an important aspect of childhood cognitive development. Here, we focused on participants' awareness of the contents of their working memory, or "meta-working memory," which seems important because people can put cognitive abilities to best use…

Aim: This study gathered views of 10 to 12-years-old pupils about their play experiences before and after transition to secondary school, comparing access to their right to play. Method: A multiple-case study design was used to gather views of six Year 6 primary pupils and six Year 7 secondary pupils living in the same community in the United…

The developmental trajectory of the use of morphemes is still unclear. We investigated the emergence of morphological effects on visual word recognition in German in a large sample across the complete course of reading acquisition in elementary school. To this end, we analyzed lexical decision data on a total of 1,152 words and pseudowords from a…

Despite the popularity of task-based language teaching (TBLT) in foreign language (FL) education at elementary school, it remains unclear how young learners' FL abilities can best be evaluated with tasks. The present study seeks to understand developmental differences in interactions among elementary-school students during task-based language…

Marlene Chesney describes a piece of research where the participants were asked to complete a calculation, 16 + 8, and then asked to describe how they solved it. The diversity of invented strategies will be of interest to teachers along with the recommendations that are made. So "how do 'you' solve 16 + 8?"

In Finland, schools' effectiveness in fostering the development of transversal skills is evaluated through large-scale learning to learn (LTL) assessments. This article presents how LTL skills--general cognitive competences and learning-related motivational beliefs--develop during primary school and how they predict pupils' CPS skills at the end…

How does understanding the decimal system change with age and experience? Second, third, sixth graders, and adults (Experiment 1: N = 96, mean ages = 7.9, 9.23, 12.06, and 19.96 years, respectively) made number line estimates across 3 scales (0-1,000, 0-10,000, and 0-100,000). Generation of linear estimates increased with age but decreased with…

Guided by a risk and resilience framework, the current study examined the associations between Latino adolescents' ("n" = 219; "M" [subscript age] = 14.35; "SD" = 1.75) perceptions of ethnic discrimination in multiple settings (e.g., online, school) and several domains of adjustment (e.g., mental health, academic),…

In 4 studies, the authors examined how intuitions about the relative difficulties of the sciences develop. In Study 1, familiar everyday phenomena in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics were pretested in adults, so as to be equally difficult to explain. When participants in kindergarten, Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8, and college were…

This study compared the abilities of 30 sixth-grade, competent readers and 30 adult, competent readers to process syntactic structures under conditions of related and unrelated discourse. Results suggest the ability to process syntactic and semantic elements is not fully developed in children in the 11- to 12-year range. (Author/SJL)

This report describes district-level results from the 2007-2008 AISD Student Climate Survey.

A developmental reversal in accuracy was obtained for third and sixth graders and adults who judged class membership of patterns presented in a same-different task. Reversal accuracy appeared to result from an increase with age in orientation-free judgments. This hypothesis was confirmed in the subsequent two experiments. (GO)

Experiments assessed free recall performance as a function of lag across a broad range of elementary school students in grades one, three, and six and tested the hypothesis that repeating an item facilitated memory performance to the extent that each repetition was encoded differently, thus creating more ways to retrieve. (RH)

Specific comparisons for a categorized set of items indicated that recall of detailed drawings and outlines was superior to recall of words. For an uncategorized set, outlines were recalled significantly better than pictures and both were recalled better than words. (Author/PN)