More research is needed to understand the effects of school-based mindfulness programs in the years before adolescence, which represent a critical juncture and transitional period of development. The present study investigated mindfulness with elementary school students using random assignment and objective measures. The sample included 292 5th…

School-aged English Learners (ELs) are faced with the challenging task of acquiring a foreign language while simultaneously reading academically demanding literature. Therefore, the current research aimed to examine the relation between the rate of grammatical tense marking errors made by ELs and their performance on measures of reading…

Understanding the extent to which youth and families experienced COVID-related stress requires accounting for prior levels of stress and other associated factors. This is especially important for military families, which experience unique stressors and may be reluctant to seek outside help. In this prospective study, we examined the role of…

Purpose: We examined whether affix type and base word transparency explained variation in third- through sixth-grade students' performance on a number of morphological awareness tasks. Method: Third- through sixth-grade students (n > 500 at each grade) completed morphological awareness tasks from the Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the parent-report Short Form Positive Family Support Strengths and Needs Assessment (PFS-SaNA). The PFS-SaNA is designed to reduce the time and burden of collaborative mental health screening. Parents of 245 students in the Northwest completed the screener at third, fourth,…

Reading nonfiction texts with understanding is important to school success, yet many students struggle to do so. This randomized controlled trial extends previous research by contrasting an earlier iteration of a comprehension tutoring program (Comp) against a variant with strategies for transferring learning (Comp+Transfer). Participants were 189…

The purpose of this feasibility study was to examine the potential impact of reading digital interactive e-books, Word Knowledge e-books (WKe-Books), on essential skills that support reading comprehension with third-fifth grade students. Students (N= 425) read two WKe-Books, that taught word learning and comprehension monitoring strategies in the…

Open-ended verbal creativity assessments are commonly administered in psychological research and in educational practice to elementary-aged children. Children's responses are then typically rated by teams of judges who are trained to identify original ideas, hopefully with a degree of inter-rater agreement. Even in cases where the judges are…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to advance the analysis of written language transcripts by validating an automated scoring procedure using an automated open-access tool for calculating morphological complexity (MC) from written transcripts. Method: The MC of words in 146 written responses of students in fifth grade was assessed using two…

Prior research supports the need for elementary-aged students with reading difficulties (RDs) to receive explicit systematic small-group evidence-based reading instruction. Yet for many students, simply receiving evidence-based reading instruction in a small-group setting is insufficient to reach the progress milestones needed to meet grade-level…

Socio-emotional constructs have been receiving increased attention as contributors to children's literacy development. However, in comparison to positive socio-emotional constructs, negative socio-emotional constructs have been understudied with respect to their role in reading achievement in both dual language learners (DLLs) and English speakers…

Purpose: We examined the extent to which achievement goals predict reading comprehension, measured by two response formats (free recall and constructed response), and how these relations differ for students with and without reading difficulties (RD). We further explored how executive functions (working memory and semantic verbal fluency) mediate…

Despite decades of research, the creative process remains to be fully understood, and most theories and empirical evidence focus on adults' creativity. Without understanding children's creative processes, the generalizability of these theories is questionable, which is crucial for teaching, learning, and parenting. However, studying children's…

Promoting prosocial behavior toward those who are dissimilar from oneself is an urgent contemporary issue. Because children spend much time in same-gender relationships, promoting other-gender prosociality could help them develop more inclusive relationships. Our goal in the present research was to better understand the extent to which…

Boys and girls sit together in most classrooms, but do they interact? Based on forty-year-old evidence, coeducational classes may not be coeducational but instead be segregated by gender, which may undermine student success. Our goal is to answer this question in today's classrooms. We used longitudinal data to assess gender segregation in 26…