Using reliable and valid measures of students' outcomes which are sensitive to change is critical for obtaining interpretable and therefore useful results from evaluations of school-based interventions. While measurement development for use in experimental evaluations receives a great deal of attention in the U.S., it lags behind in low-income…

This study examines the academic abilities of children and adolescents who were once diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, but who no longer meet diagnostic criteria for this disorder. These individuals have achieved social and language skills within the average range for their ages, receive little or no school support, and are referred to…

Age of acquisition (AoA) effects have been used to support the notion of a critical period for first language acquisition. In this study, we examine AoA effects in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users via a grammaticality judgment task. When English reading performance and nonverbal IQ are factored out, results show that accuracy of…

This article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of…

Much work is currently being undertaken to investigate the effectiveness of informal, "drop-in" mathematics support services. This can be a difficult task; students are individuals with different expectations and backgrounds, and support that is effective for one student, may be less effective in relation to another. This article…

Phonological awareness has been repeatedly reported as important for learning to read in different orthographies. It is important to understand what specific levels of phonological awareness are involved in Chinese and English for Chinese children who learn English-as-a-second-language (ESL). Measures of phonological awareness, word reading,…

A vast array of studies has demonstrated that stimulating activities within the family (e.g., reading to child, singing together) positively affect children's development in various domains. However, this influence is less established for children of immigrants. This paper analyses the impact of familial activities on non-verbal cognitive skills…

This study considered how far nonverbal cognitive, language and reading abilities are affected by common genetic influences in a sample of 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years. Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme…

Prior research has shown that quantity of schooling affects the development of intelligence in childhood and adolescence. However, it is still debated whether other aspects of schooling--such as ability tracking or, more generally, school quality--can also influence intelligence. In this study, the authors analyzed intelligence gains in academic-…

One hundred twenty-one third-grade Chinese children were assessed with a new morphological awareness task involving open-ended lexical compounding, in addition to completing other measures. With children's age, nonverbal intelligence, phonological awareness, and previously established measures of morphological awareness statistically controlled,…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of a program that offered sustained strategic reading instruction on reading abilities of third and fourth graders. The study was conducted among 1,469 children from 40 schools in the Netherlands. Schools were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group. Multilevel…

This study focused on the associations of general auditory processing, speech perception, phonological awareness and word reading in Cantonese-speaking children from Hong Kong learning to read both Chinese (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]). Children in Grades 2--4 ("N" = 133) participated and were administered…

This study examined whether there are processing differences between children with Down syndrome (DS; n = 22; 7 years 8 months to 13 years 10 months) and typically developing children (TD; n = 22; 6 years 6 months to 10 years 10 months), matched for receptive vocabulary. The TD children performed better on tests of nonverbal intelligence…

This study tested whether the association between temporal processing (TP) and reading is mediated by phonological awareness (PA) in a normative sample of 615 eight-year-olds. TP was measured with auditory and bimodal (visual-auditory) temporal order judgment tasks and PA with a phoneme deletion task. PA partially mediated the association between…

In this study, we investigated the characteristics of cognitive abilities as predictors of Korean reading and spelling ability, and the characteristics of the cognition of reading difficulty in Korean. In 103 Korean third-grade children, we tested ability to read and spell, nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary size, phonological cognitive…