Four year old children’s acquisition of print knowledge during electronic storybook reading

The experiment reported here explored the importance of engaging 4-year-old children’s interest in the print itself during storybook reading. We explored the effect of computer animation of the print in order to draw the child’s attention to each word as it was read. We also investigated the influence of illustrating that not all visual displays are readable print on the child’s print knowledge. The measures of interest were print concept knowledge and early reading skill. Results indicated that simply drawing children’s attention to the print during shared reading was insufficient to facilitate children’s learning of print conventions, but this attention to print while hearing stories read did improve children’s letter reading. The child’s active engagement with the print during shared story reading led to further improvements in written language skills, as illustrated by gains in knowledge about print concepts.     

The role of compound awareness in Chinese children’s vocabulary acquisition and character reading

This study examined compound awareness in relation to Chinese children's vocabulary acquisition and character reading. Two aspects of compound awareness were investigated: the ability to identify the head of a compound noun and the ability to construct a new compound word from familiar morphemes. The compound awareness tasks, along with rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonological awareness tasks, were administered to 29 first graders and 30 second graders in Mainland China. Results show that (1) compound awareness develops relatively early among Chinese children and improves with age, (2) compound awareness explains unique variance in vocabulary and character reading, after controlling for age, RAN, and phonological awareness, and (3) the contribution made by compound awareness to vocabulary is much larger than the contribution made by phonological awareness. These results demonstrate that compound awareness plays a central role in Chinese children's literacy development, particularly in vocabulary acquisition.

Causal knowledge and children’s possibility judgments

Children often say that strange and improbable events, like eating pickle-flavored ice cream, are impossible. Two experiments explored whether these beliefs are explained by limits in children's causal knowledge. Participants were 423 predominantly White Canadian 4- to 7-year-olds (44% female) tested in 2020–2021. Providing children with causal information about ordinary events did not lead them to affirm that improbable events are possible, and they more often affirmed improbable events after merely learning that a similar event had occurred. However, children were most likely to affirm events if they learned how similar events happened (OR = 2.16). The findings suggest that knowledge of causal circumstances may only impact children's beliefs about the possibility after they are able to draw connections between potential events and known events.     

Prosodic awareness and children’s multisyllabic word reading

Prosodic awareness (the rhythmic patterning of speech) accounts for unique variance in reading development. However, studies have thus far focused on early readers and utilised literacy measures which fail to distinguish between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. The current study investigated the factors that are specifically associated with multisyllabic word reading in a sample of 50 children aged between 7 and 8 years. Prosodic awareness was the strongest predictor of multisyllabic word reading accuracy, after controlling for phoneme awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary and short-term memory. Children also made surprisingly few phonemic errors while, in contrast, errors of stress assignment were commonplace. Prosodic awareness was also the strongest predictor of stress placement errors, although this finding was not significant. Prosodic skills may play an increasingly important role in literacy performance as children encounter more complex reading materials. Once phoneme-level skills are mastered, prosodic awareness is arguably the strongest predictor of single word reading.     

Parents resourcing children’s early development and learning

Parents deal with a complex web of choices when seeking and using knowledge and resources related to their young children’s literacy development. Information concerning children’s learning and development comes in many forms and is produced by an increasingly diverse range of players including governments, non‐government organisations and commercial businesses. This study used a survey, interview and artefact collection to investigate mothers’ and fathers’ reported activities in seeking, accessing, producing and circulating information and resources related to children’s learning and development. Differences were found relating to parent gender and level of education. Parents’ resourcing activities are also shaped by their particular goals for their children.     

Understanding prosody and morphology in school-age children’s reading

Reading and Writing - We examined the unique contributions of prosodic awareness and morphological awareness to school-aged children’s word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 110...     

Do teachers’ perceptions of children’s math and reading related ability and effort predict children’s self-concept of ability in math and reading?

This study investigated to what extent primary school teachers’ perceptions of their students’ ability and effort predict developmental changes in children’s self-concepts of ability in math and reading after controlling for students’ academic performance and general intelligence. Three cohorts (N?=?849) of elementary school children and their teachers were followed for four years. Children’s self-concepts and performance ability in math and reading were measured annually during Waves 2–4. Teachers rated the children’s ability and effort at each of the four waves. Domain-specific differences and developmental changes could be identified in the associations between teachers’ perceptions and children’s ability self-concepts. Teachers’ ability perceptions predicted children’s concurrent and subsequent ability self-concepts in math and reading, whereas teachers’ effort perceptions predicted children’s math ability self-concept only at Wave 4. Analyses with multi-sample procedure showed that these models were similar for boys and girls and for children in different cohort groups.     

Parents’ assessments of their children’s abilities

Conducted in the framework of the theory of social representations, the study was designed to examine the dimensions in terms of which parents assess their children’s abilities, the ways in which social positions — here, the parents’ education and gender and the child’s gender — organize these assessments, and the ways in which the assessments relate to the estimated school success of the child. The subjects were a nationwide sample of parents (N=938), who were asked to estimate their children’s school success and to assess these children’s abilities. A factor analysis showed the ability assessments to be multidimensional. The parents assessed girls’ cognitive and social abilities to be better than boys’. Academically educated parents drew a more categorical distinction than other parents between cognitive and other abilities, which suggests that they endorse a differential conception of intelligence. A clear congruity of content was observed between the estimations of school success and the assessments of abilities, indicating that different school subjects are associated with different abilities.     

Reading teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature and English phonology

We investigated relationships among elementary teachers’ reading-related content knowledge (knowledge of literature and phonology), their philosophical orientation toward reading instruction, their classroom practice, and their students’ learning. Correlations showed little relationship between instructional philosophy and content knowledge, and little relationship between instructional philosophy and classroom practice. However, relationships emerged between content knowledge and instruction, and between kindergarten teachers’ phonological knowledge and their students’ reading achievement. We recommend that the recent focus on teacher’s disciplinary knowledge be broadened to include teachers of beginning reading and that teachers be afforded opportunities to develop the necessary knowledge base to teach reading effectively.     

Relationships between teachers’ metacognitive knowledge and students’ metacognitive knowledge and reading achievement

The study examined the relationships between teachers’ metacognitive knowledge of reading strategies and their students’ metacognitive knowledge and reading comprehension. The study was carried out among language art teachers (N?=?34) and their students (N?=?534) in the last year of primary school (ninth grade) in Estonia. Multilevel modeling was used to test the hypotheses of relationships between students’ metacognitive knowledge and reading comprehension, while controlling for students’ previous reading comprehension (in eighth grade) as well as the relations between teachers’ metacognitive knowledge of reading strategies and students’ metacognitive knowledge and comprehension. The results showed that students’ metacognitive knowledge of reading strategies related to their reading comprehension, concurring with previous findings. The main finding was that teachers’ metacognitive knowledge of reading strategies significantly related to their students’ metacognitive knowledge, but not to reading comprehension. These results indicate that students’ reading comprehension may be supported by improving their metacognitive knowledge of reading strategies. In addition, the findings highlight the importance of teachers’ metacognitive knowledge in students’ metacognitive knowledge.     

Variability in children’s early reading strategies

The present study examines the development of sight word reading in young children by examining changes in their self‐reported reading strategies over time. A sample of 65 five to seven year olds were asked to read 40 real word items, all carefully matched for letter length and word frequency, on three separate occasions. Changes in the children’s word identifications were measured using immediately retrospective verbal self‐reports. Overall, the results showed some variability in the children’s self‐reported reading strategies. Over time the children relied less on phonological strategies and moved towards reliance on directly retrieving words from memory. This change was most evident in the older children; while both year groups showed similar patterns of shifting reliance from explicit phonological strategies to retrieval, this shift was simply less frequent among the younger children. An analysis of word‐specific changes in reading strategies showed that the older children had a better sight vocabulary for more complex word items. These findings provide further support for Ehri’s mediated phase theory in explaining children’s development in learning to read.     

Opening the black box: user-log analyses of children’s e-Book reading and associations with word knowledge

Reading and Writing - Third to fifth graders read an interactive choose-your-own adventure e-Book. User logs recorded their reading behaviors and were used to investigate students’...     

Recycling Piaget: Posthumanism and making children’s knowledge matter

A growing body of research incorporates children’s perspectives into the research process. If we are to take children’s perspectives seriously in education research, research methodologies must be capable of addressing issues that matter to children. This article engages in a theoretical discussion that considers how a posthuman research methodology can support such an effort. Piaget’s early and lesser known qualitative studies on children’s conception of the world are re-read along with Karen Barad’s posthuman theory, using Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity. Through a plastic reading of Piaget and Barad, I consider how a posthuman theoretical framework might contribute to research seeking to access children’s perspectives. Before concluding, I reflect on some ethical concerns regarding posthuman research in education.     

Parents’ perfectionistic tendencies and children’s early numeracy competence: the mediating roles of children’s executive functions and numeracy interest

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Parents’ high academic expectations have often been found to benefit children’s academic outcomes. Nonetheless, little is known whether...     

Prosodic and phonemic awareness in children’s reading of long and short words

Phonemic and prosodic awareness are both phonological processes that operate at different levels: the former at the level of the individual sound segment and the latter at the suprasegmental level across syllables. Both have been shown to be related to word reading in young readers. In this study we examine how these processes are differentially related to reading monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. Participants were 110 children in grades four and five who were asked to read monosyllabic and three- and four-syllable words matched for frequency. Phonemic awareness was assessed via a phoneme elision task; prosodic awareness was assessed by a task asking participants to identify the syllable bearing primary stress in a spoken word. Results showed that phonemic and prosodic awareness were independent predictors of short word reading, and both phonological factors made independent contributions to multisyllabic word reading, showing that phonemic and prosodic awareness are complementary but not redundant processes. Only prosodic awareness survived control for simple decoding ability in the reading of long words, suggesting that suprasegmental phonology gives added value to our understanding of reading multisyllabic words.     

Measuring teachers’ content knowledge of language and reading

In the context of a longitudinal, four-year study of reading instruction in low-performing, high-poverty urban schools, we surveyed teacher knowledge of reading-related concepts, and established a modest predictive relationship between teachers’ knowledge, classroom reading achievement levels, and teachers’ observed teaching competence. There were significant associations among these variables at the third and fourth grade levels. To obtain this result, measures of teacher content knowledge in language and reading were refined in a three-stage process. Our purpose was to explore the type and level of questions that would begin to discriminate more capable from less capable teachers, and that would have a predictive relationship with student reading achievement outcomes. After experimenting with measurement of K-2 teachers’ content knowledge (Form #1), we piloted a Teacher Knowledge Survey with 41 second and third grade teachers in one study site (Form #2). We then refined and expanded the Survey (Form #3) and administered it to 103 third and fourth grade teachers in both project sites. Teachers’ misconceptions about sounds, words, sentences, and principles of instruction were pinpointed so that professional development could address teachers’ needs for insight and information about language structure and student learning.     

Parents’ beliefs about young children’s play and nature experiences in Danish and US contexts

Two studies were conducted in the US and Denmark to examine parents’ beliefs about the importance of play and nature experiences for early childhood development. Thirty parents in the US and 19 parents in Denmark completed semi-structured interviews with quantitative and qualitative elements. Although families in both contexts highly valued outdoor and nature experiences, parents in the Danish context provided a stronger rationale for taking children outdoors regardless of environmental conditions and affording them opportunities to explore freely and take risks. Parents in the US focused mainly on individual developmental benefits of play, whereas parents in Denmark also acknowledged the importance of spending time in nature for society and the environment. The findings provide evidence that sociocultural values and expectations influence parental beliefs and practices regarding outdoor and nature play, and have implications for young children’s play opportunities within and across cultural contexts.     

Lexical quality and executive control predict children’s first and second language reading comprehension

This study compared how lexical quality (vocabulary and decoding) and executive control (working memory and inhibition) predict reading comprehension directly as well as indirectly, via syntactic integration, in monolingual and bilingual fourth grade children. The participants were 76 monolingual and 102 bilingual children (mean age 10 years, SD = 5 months) learning to read Dutch in the Netherlands. Bilingual children showed lower Dutch vocabulary, syntactic integration and reading comprehension skills, but better decoding skills than their monolingual peers. There were no differences in working memory or inhibition. Multigroup path analysis showed relatively invariant connections between predictors and reading comprehension for monolingual and bilingual readers. For both groups, there was a direct effect of lexical quality on reading comprehension. In addition, lexical quality and executive control indirectly influenced reading comprehension via syntactic integration. The groups differed in that inhibition more strongly predicted syntactic integration for bilingual than for monolingual children. For a subgroup of bilingual children, for whom home language vocabulary data were available (n = 56), there was an additional positive effect of home language vocabulary on second language reading comprehension. Together, the results suggest that similar processes underlie reading comprehension in first and second language readers, but that syntactic integration requires more executive control in second language reading. Moreover, bilingual readers additionally benefit from first language vocabulary to arrive at second language reading comprehension.     

The impact of reading material’s lexical accessibility on text fading effects in children’s reading performance

The acceleration phenomenon (AP) is defined by improvements in reading speed and reading comprehension, induced by an artificial text fading procedure corresponding to the previously determined fastest individual reading rate. Recent results, however, indicated that fading that is slower than the self-paced reading rate can produce comparable reading enhancements. As reading performance can be strongly influenced by the reading material, this study aimed at investigating to which extent reading enhancements induced by text fading depend on the reading material’s characteristics. We confronted 39 German third graders with a previously utilized text fading procedure, which was slower than their self-paced reading rate. Included text varied regarding to the lexical accessibility (LA), representing how well information can be accessed from the mental lexicon. Children’s reading rates increased statistically significant due to text fading for all LA levels. However, reading comprehension was sensitive to the text material’s characteristics: Reading comprehension enhancements were observable for easily accessible reading material, but not for material with intermediate or difficult levels of LA. Material that was difficult to retrieve from the mental lexicon even resulted in reduced reading comprehension in the fading condition. Possible influences on immediate lexical access, the impact of working memory capacity and implications for future AP research are discussed.