Sight word acquisition in first grade students at risk for reading disabilities: an item-level exploration of the number of exposures required for mastery

Unraveling individual differences in learning potential: A dynamic framework for the case of reading development

Children show an enormous capacity to learn during development, but with large individual differences in the time course and trajectory of learning and the achieved skill level. Recent progress in developmental sciences has shown the contribution of a multitude of factors including genetic variation, brain plasticity, socio-cultural context and learning experiences to individual development. These factors interact in a complex manner, producing children's idiosyncratic and heterogeneous learning paths. Despite an increasing recognition of these intricate dynamics, current research on the development of culturally acquired skills such as reading still has a typical focus on snapshots of children's performance at discrete points in time. Here we argue that this 'static' approach is often insufficient and limits advancements in the prediction and mechanistic understanding of individual differences in learning capacity. We present a dynamic framework which highlights the importance of capturing short-term trajectories during learning across multiple stages and processes as a proxy for long-term development on the example of reading. This framework will help explain relevant variability in children's learning paths and outcomes and fosters new perspectives and approaches to study how children develop and learn.

Capitalizing on the promise of item-level analyses to inform new understandings of word reading development

This special issue was expressly designed to illustrate how item-level analytic models can be employed to answer new questions in the field of reading. To accomplish this, we present a compilation of six empirical studies that explore how item-level analyses can be used to advance the field's understanding of word reading development. In this introduction to the special issue, I summarize the unique advantages of item-level analyses and discuss how the papers in this special issue are valuable examples of how item-focused analyses can be used in a variety of ways to address important questions across orthographies, word characteristics, and tasks.