Maternal Math Talk in the Home and Math Skills in Preschool Children

Research Findings: The current study analyzed the relation between the amount of mathematical input that preschool children hear (i.e., math talk) from their mothers in their homes and their early math ability a year later. Forty mother–child dyads recorded their naturalistic exchanges in their homes using an enhanced audio-recording device (the Language ENvironment Analysis System). Results from a sample of naturalistic interactions during mealtimes indicated that all mothers involved their children in a variety of math exchanges, although there were differences in the amount of math input that children received. Moreover, being exposed to more instances of math talk was positively related to children’s early mathematical ability a year after the recordings, even after we controlled for maternal education, self-regulation, and recorded minutes. Practice or Policy: These findings improve the understanding of how mothers use math with their preschool children in naturalistic contexts, providing some insight for parents into how to foster children’s math skills through verbal input in their normal routines. Moreover, these findings inform kindergarten teachers and practitioners about the math input that children receive at home, which may encourage them to adapt their practice by considering the home environment.     

The Development of Message Evaluation Skills in Young Children

The goal of this research was to learn if young children overestimate message quality because they evaluate their knowledge or assumptions about the intended meaning of the message, rather than its literal meaning. 2 experiments were conducted with preschoolers (4 years) and kindergartners (5-6 years). Second graders (8 years) also participated in the first experiment. Children evaluated the communicative quality of informative, ambiguous, and ineffective picture messages in a simple communication game. In the first experiment, children knew the intended referent when they evaluated the message. The results showed that younger children overestimated the informativeness of the ambiguous and ineffective messages, while older children evaluated message quality accurately, even though they knew the intended meaning. In the second experiment, younger children detected more of the message ambiguities when they did not know the target referent than when they were informed of the intended interpretation. The results suggest that young children overestimate message quality because they evaluate their interpretation of the message rather than its literal meaning.     

A Professional Development Program to Improve Math Skills Among Preschool Children in Head Start

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects on four-year-olds’ knowledge of mathematics by introducing professional development and center-based mathematics activities around four mathematical domains to early educators’ teaching in Head Start programs. Because of the need to provide necessary mathematical experiences to young children to improve their early understanding and skills and provide the foundation for future success in mathematics, we provided the treatment group of early educators with professional development and center-based activities to promote four critical areas in mathematics. By randomly selecting Head Start centers to participate as the treatment group or control group, we were able to examine the effects of the professional development and set of activities on preschool children’s knowledge over a six-month period. We found children in the treatment group were more fluent and flexible with number concepts, were better at solving contextual problems, and had better measurement and spatial abilities than children in the control group.     

Mothering in Families With and Without a Child with Disability

This paper describes some features of a study which compares and contrasts mothers’ perceptions of their family life in three different family environments, those without a child with disability and those families who live with a child with an intellectual or physical disability. All families have children in the middle childhood period allowing the mothers to reflect on earlier experiences and changes in their family life. Mothers’ psychological characteristics are explored in terms of the coping resources they utilise when meeting stressful life situations in their family and how their personal resilience and vulnerability is related to these individual coping resources.     

The Development of Reading Skills in Children With English as a Second Language

One goal of this longitudinal study was to examine whether the predictors of reading skills in Grade 3 would differ between English as a second language (ESL) students and native English-speaking (L1) students. Phonological processing, syntactic awareness, memory, spelling, word reading, and lexical access skills were assessed in kindergarten and in Grade 3. The results indicated that in kindergarten, the ESL group had significantly lower scores on phonological processing, syntactic awareness, spelling, and memory for sentences tasks. However, in Grade 3, the ESL group performed in a similar way to the L1 group except on the syntactic awareness task. The combination of the two kindergarten measures, memory for sentences and Oral Cloze, and the combination of phonological processing and letter identification all contributed equally to predicting the L1 students' word-reading skills. However, for ESL students, letter identification and phonological processing made much larger contributions to predicting Grade 3 reading ability. Another goal of this study was to assess the procedures used to identify reading disability in the ESL and L1 student sample. Performance on two measures—letter identification and phonological awareness in kindergarten—predicted whether students would be classified in Grade 3 as at risk or having typical reading development for the ESL and L1 groups. The ESL children developed strong reading skills, and their status as ESL speakers did not put them at risk for reading difficulties in Grade 3. ESL students were not at any particular risk for reading difficulties after 4 years in Canadian schooling with an adequate balanced literacy program.     

Dimensionality of Reading Skills With Elementary-School-Age Children

Confirmatory factor analyses of data from 1,501 kindergarten to 5th-grade children who completed 3 measures of decoding, 3 measures of reading comprehension, and 3 measures of listening comprehension as part of a larger study were used to identify the dimensionality of reading skills across elementary school. A 1-factor (reading) model was the best fitting model for the reading measures for kindergarten through 2nd grade, and a 2-factor (decoding, reading comprehension) model was the best fitting model for 3rd through 5th grade. Structural analyses revealed little evidence that any of the reading-comprehension measures were more or less associated with either listening comprehension or decoding than the other reading-comprehension measures, indicating that each measure assessed the same underlying construct. These results support a developmental pattern for the emergence of decoding and reading comprehension as distinctly measurable constructs, with a distinct reading comprehension construct not emerging until the 3rd grade.     

Assessing Early Language Development in Children with Vision Disability and Motor Disability

This article describes a method for identifying test items as disability neutral for children with vision and motor disabilities. Graduate students rated 130 items of the Preschool Language Scale and obtained inter‐rater correlation coefficients of 0.58 for ratings of items as disability neutral for children with vision disability, and 0.77 for ratings of items as disability neutral for children with motor disability. These ratings were used to create three item sets considered disability neutral for children with vision disability, motor disability, or both disabilities. Two methods for scoring the item sets were identified: scoring each set as a partially administered developmental test, or computing standard scores based upon pro‐rated raw score totals. The pro‐rated raw score method generated standard scores that were significantly inflated and therefore less useful for the assessment purposes than the ratio quotient method. This research provides a test accommodation technique for assessing children with multiple disabilities.     

数学焦虑影响数学学业成就的作用机制——数学元认知的中介作用

选取小学2～6年级学生共285人为被试,采用儿童数学焦虑量表(MASC)和小学数学元认知问卷(QPMAM)进行调查,将被试最近两次大型数学测验的平均分作为儿童数学学业成就的效标.探查儿童的数学焦虑,数学元认知和数学学业成就3者之间的关系和相互作用机制.结果表明:(1)数学焦虑和数学学业成就存在负向相关.(2)中等、高数学焦虑组儿童数学学业成就显著低于低数学焦虑组,中等、高数学焦虑组儿童数学元认知水平显著低于低数学焦虑组.(3)数学元认知在数学焦虑和数学学业成就之间起到了完全中介的作用.     

The Relationship of Locus of Control and Metacognitive Knowledge of Math with Math Achievements

The purpose of the research was to examine the correlation between locus of control and metacognitive knowledge in math and math achievement among students with learning disabilities. We examined 30 eighth grade pupils with learning disabilities and 30 other pupils all of whom studied in a heterogeneous class in a public school in order to better understand the extent to which the variables: metacognitive knowledge, locus of control and achievement in math differed in the two populations. The pupils answered three questionnaires: the first was designed to study the locus of control, the second, to investigate metacognitive knowledge and the third, to measure math achievement. The findings of this study indicate that the higher the level of the internal locus of control, the higher the use of metacognitive knowledge. Furthermore, higher levels of internal locus of control and higher use of metacognitive knowledge resulted in increased math achievement.     

学习不良儿童的家庭环境分析

儿童学习不良问题是目前困扰义务教育发展的一个重要问题。家庭环境有硬环境和软环境之分，硬环境比如家庭的成员结构、成员素质、资源分配、生活方式等，软环境比如家庭成员间的关系、父母的教养方式和态度、家庭功能等，这些因素都会对儿童学习不良造成不同程度的影响。改善学习不良儿童家庭环境的几点建议包括：（1）给予孩子积极关注；（2）创造良好的家庭心理环境；（3）改善家庭功能，明确角色定位；（4）与孩子共同学习、共同成长；（5）关注孩子的身心健康。     

Differences in Child Care Quality for Children With and Without Disabilities

Research Findings: Federal, state, and local agencies legislate and support inclusive settings for the education of young children with disabilities. Recommended practices outline critical elements for meeting the educational and developmental needs of children with and without disabilities in inclusive settings, and minimal and essential quality characteristics have been articulated. Research has suggested that inclusive and non-inclusive settings may offer different levels of care as measured against best practices and essential quality characteristics. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine program quality in inclusive and non-inclusive preschool classrooms using observational, interview, and survey data. Results showed that inclusive classrooms earned higher scores on an observational measure of global quality and higher scores on an observational measure of language and literacy. Results also suggested that teachers with higher levels of education tend to have classrooms of higher quality. Practice or Policy: Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

Promoting Prosocial Behaviours Among Preschool Children With and Without Disabilities

A multiple probe across subjects design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention program on promoting prosocial behaviours among preschool children with and without disabilities. The intervention was carried out with three integrated groups of children, each comprised of one child with a disability and two peers without disabilities, created from three mainstreamed preschool classrooms. The intervention was successful in promoting increases in positive social interactions among the children with disabilities and their peers without disabilities. For two of the three groups the children with disabilities engaged in an equal or greater percentage of positive social initiations than their peers without disabilities. Increases in positive social responses to positive social initiations were similar for children with and without disabilities. Intervention phase behavioural changes generalised to both immediate group conditions, but did not generalise to deferred classroom conditions. Variability of response to intervention across groups highlights the need to develop and implement interventions on an individualised basis. The results indicate that further research is needed regarding the promotion of deferred generalisation effects as well as understanding the effects that trainer presence may have on the generalisation of the targeted social behaviours. There is also a need for the investigation of the potential for gender‐related effects including differential activity levels, ability for sustained attention, and group composition.     

Statistical Learning of Orthographic Regularities in Chinese Children With and Without Dyslexia

This study examined distributional statistical learning of positional, phonetic, and semantic regularities of an artificial orthography in Chinese children aged 8–10 years: 29 with dyslexia, 29 age-matched controls, and 30 reading-level matched controls. Despite having positional regularity learning performance comparable to the controls, the children with dyslexia were poorer at learning left-right structured characters than top-bottom structured characters in high- and low-consistency conditions. Moreover, they showed difficulties in mapping a given sound or meaning to a specific character compared with the typically developing controls. These findings suggest that children with dyslexia have deficits in some, though not all, aspects of statistical learning of character orthography, which may reflect their difficulties in coping with distractors and inconsistency of orthographic input.     

Project on the Effectiveness of Learning Strategies and Metacognitive Skills

Teachers should not only be concerned with the products of learning but also with the processes of learning as good teaching involves teaching pupils how to learn effectively. The importance of teaching pupils ‘to learn how to learn’ has gained momentum as recent research provides more and more evidence that substantial variance in learning outcomes can be attributed to learning approaches adopted by pupils (Marton, 1976; Marton and Sayo, 1978; Svenssin and Theman 1983; Marton and Saljo, 1984; Biggs, 1987; Chew 1988; Cheng, 1985).     

Teacher Judgments of Student Reading and Math Skills: Associations With Child- and Classroom-Related Factors

The purpose of the study was to examine whether students’ linguistic skills and task-avoidant behavior (i.e., the child-related factors) and the mean level of academic skills (reading comprehension and math) of classmates (i.e., the class-related factor) are associated with teacher judgments of children’s reading comprehension and math skills. The participants were third-grade Estonian-speaking students (n?=?656; age 9?11 years) and their classroom teachers (n?=?51). The results of the structural equation modeling path analyses indicated that teachers tend to judge students showing higher academic and linguistic skills and lower avoidance behavior as higher on the reading comprehension and math skills. In contrast, the classmates’ higher academic skill level was related to lower judgments of individual children’s reading comprehension and math skills by teachers.     

教师元认知技能研究及其培训途径

随着教师教育运动的国际化 ,教师元认知技能的培训已被视为提高教师教育教学能力的一个新途径。加强对教师元认知技能的培养有助于增强教师的反思能力 ,有助于增强教师的自我教学效能感与实际教学能力 ,有助于增强教师的教学监控能力。教师元认知技能培训有以下途径 :加强对教师元认知知识的培训 ,加强对教师元认知调节控制能力的实践模拟训练 ,加强对教师自我效能感的激励活动     

数学课堂提问的艺术

课堂提问能充分调动学生的求知欲和主动性,也能促使师生的情感和信息充分、及时地得到交流,使课堂气氛活跃,学生思维开阔,提高课堂教学效率. 1.课堂提问的语言要亲近     

Academic Achievement and Social Functioning of Children With and Without Learning Difficulties

The academic achievement and social functioning of children with learning difficulties (LD) and children without LD (7–12 years old) was examined. Attainment scores in mathematics and English were obtained for each child, and a sample of children without LD was further classified as low achieving (LA) or high achieving (HA) on the basis of these scores. Sociometric and peer behavioural attribute scores were collected for each child. Findings indicated correlations of attainment with sociometric status and also with behaviour attributes. Boys and girls differed on the proportion of variance in sociometric status accounted for by academic achievement and also by various behavioural attributes. HA children scored higher on positive sociometric status than children with LD, and higher on positive behaviours than both LA children and children with LD. Children with LD scored higher on negative behaviours than both HA and LA children. The findings are discussed as indicating a relationship between academic achievement and social adjustment, suggesting that intervention strategies need to target social relationship difficulties in LA children as well as children with LD, while also accounting for possible gender differences.     

Modeling the Early Paths of Phonological Awareness and Factors Supporting its Development in Children With and Without Familial Risk of Dyslexia

The development of phonological awareness (PA) before school age was modeled in association with the development of vocabulary and letter knowledge, home literacy environment (HLE), children's reading interest, and beginning reading skill in children with and without familial risk of dyslexia. A total of 186 children were followed from birth to the age of 6.5 years. Of these children, about half had a familial background of reading difficulties (the at-risk group), and the other half came from families without such background (the control group). The data from several measures and assessment time points were analyzed within an SEM framework, and a latent analysis of growth curves was employed. Vocabulary and letter knowledge were found to predict PA development, and vice versa, PA predicted them. The effect of HLE on PA was mediated by vocabulary skills, and of the HLE variables, the only variable predicting vocabulary development was shared reading. In spite of the difference in level, favoring the controls, the pattern of effects of vocabulary and letter knowledge on PA development was highly similar in children with and without familial risk for dyslexia. However, in the at-risk group, the HLE variables and children's reading interest had stronger associations with each other and with skill development than in the control group, and vocabulary predicted parental reports on children's reading interest in the at-risk group only.