Links between repeating and growing pattern knowledge and math outcomes in children and adults

This study examined repeating and growing pattern knowledge and their associations with procedural and conceptual arithmetic knowledge in a sample of U.S. children (N = 185; M_age  = 79.5 months; 55% female; 88% White) and adults (N = 93; M_age  = 19.5 years; 62% female; 66% White) from 2019 to 2020. Three key findings emerged: (1) repeating pattern tasks were easier than growing pattern tasks, (2) repeating pattern knowledge robustly predicted procedural calculation skills over and above growing pattern knowledge and covariates, and (3) growing pattern knowledge modestly predicted procedural and conceptual math outcomes over and above repeating pattern knowledge and covariates. We expand existing theoretical models to incorporate these specific links and discuss implications for supporting math knowledge.

Associations between executive function and early math and literacy skills in preschool children

The current study directly compared the magnitude of associations between executive function (EF) and math versus literacy and investigated whether they differed by age within the preschool years. Participants were 92 typically developing, preschool children in the United States (M _age=58.53 months; 47.8% Female; 58.7% White; 29.3% Non-White). Children completed a developmentally sensitive battery of direct EF assessments, math and literacy achievement tests, and IQ tests. Results showed an EF Composite was associated with math, but not literacy, after controlling for age, verbal and nonverbal IQ, and socioeconomic status. Extending prior work to a younger age, we examined whether the association between EF and academic achievement was moderated by age but found no significant interactions. These findings support the link between EF and math before kindergarten and indicate a similar magnitude of associations in younger and older preschoolers.

Children’s confidence using incorrect strategies on mathematical equivalence problems

Children often struggle to solve mathematical equivalence problems correctly. The change-resistance theory offers an explanation for children's difficulties and suggests that some incorrect strategies represent the overgeneralization of children's narrow arithmetic experience. The current research considered children's metacognitive abilities to test a tacit assumption of the change-resistance theory by providing a novel empirical examination of children's strategy use and certainty ratings. Children were recruited from U.S. elementary school classrooms serving predominantly White students between the ages of 6 and 9. In Study 1 (n = 52) and Study 2 (n = 147), children were more certain that they were correct when they employed arithmetic-specific incorrect strategies relative to other incorrect strategies. These findings are consistent with the change-resistance theory and have implications for the development of children's metacognition.

Individual differences in executive function and learning: The role of knowledge type and conflict with prior knowledge

Executive function (EF) predicts children's academic achievement; however, less is known about the relation between EF and the actual learning process. The current study examined how aspects of the material to be learned-the type of information and the amount of conflict between the content to be learned and children's prior knowledge-influence the relation between individual differences in EF and learning. Typically developing 4-year-olds (N = 61) completed a battery of EF tasks and several animal learning tasks that varied on the type of information being learned (factual vs. conceptual) and the amount of conflict with the learners' prior knowledge (no prior knowledge vs. no conflicting prior knowledge vs. conflicting prior knowledge). Individual differences in EF predicted children's overall learning, controlling for age, verbal IQ, and prior knowledge. Children's working memory and cognitive flexibility skills predicted their conceptual learning, whereas children's inhibitory control skills predicted their factual learning. In addition, individual differences in EF mattered more for children's learning of information that conflicted with their prior knowledge. These findings suggest that there may be differential relations between EF and learning depending on whether factual or conceptual information is being taught and the degree of conceptual change that is required. A better understanding of these different relations serves as an essential foundation for future research designed to create more effective academic interventions to optimize children's learning.

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Self-distancing in Young Children

Self-distancing (i.e., creating mental distance between the self and a stimulus by adopting a less egocentric perspective) has been studied as a way to improve adolescents' and adults' emotion regulation. These studies instruct adolescents and adults to use visual imagery or language to create distance from the self before engaging in self-regulation tasks and when thinking about past and future events. For example, adults are asked to recall past, negative emotional experiences from either a first-person perspective (no distance) or a third-person perspective (self-distanced). These studies show that a self-distanced perspective allows adults to cope more adaptively when recalling negative feelings. However, the self-distancing paradigm used with adults was not developmentally appropriate for young children. This modified self-distancing paradigm involves instructing children to think about their thoughts, feelings, and actions from different perspectives that vary in their distance from the self while completing a self-regulation task. The paradigm involves randomly assigning children to use one of three perspectives: self-immersed, third-person, or exemplar. In the self-immersed condition, children are asked to think about themselves using the first-person perspective (e.g., "How am I feeling?") and no distance is created from the self. In the third-person condition, children are asked to create distance from the self by using the third-person perspective (e.g., "How is [child's name] feeling?"). In the exemplar condition, the greatest distance from the self is created by asking children to pretend to be a media character and to think about that character's thoughts and feelings (e.g., "How is Batman feeling?"). Studies using the self-distancing paradigm with 4-6-year-olds have found that as the amount of distance from the self increases (self-immersed < third-person < exemplar), children perform better on self-regulation tasks. These findings suggest that the strategies implemented in the self-distancing protocol may be useful to include in self-regulation interventions for young children.

Do semantic contextual cues facilitate transfer learning from video in toddlers?

Young children typically demonstrate a transfer deficit, learning less from video than live presentations. Semantically meaningful context has been demonstrated to enhance learning in young children. We examined the effect of a semantically meaningful context on toddlers’ imitation performance. Two- and 2.5-year-olds participated in a puzzle imitation task to examine learning from either a live or televised model. The model demonstrated how to assemble a three-piece puzzle to make a fish or a boat, with the puzzle demonstration occurring against a semantically meaningful background context (ocean) or a yellow background (no context). Participants in the video condition performed significantly worse than participants in the live condition, demonstrating the typical transfer deficit effect. While the context helped improve overall levels of imitation, especially for the boat puzzle, only individual differences in the ability to self-generate a stimulus label were associated with a reduction in the transfer deficit.

Specificity of the bilingual advantage for memory: examining cued recall, generalization, and working memory in monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual toddlers

The specificity of the bilingual advantage in memory was examined by testing groups of monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual 24-month-olds on tasks tapping cued recall, memory generalization and working memory. For the cued recall and memory generalization conditions, there was a 24-h delay between time of encoding and time of retrieval. In addition to the memory tasks, parent-toddler dyads completed a picture-book reading task, in order to observe emotional responsiveness, and a parental report of productive vocabulary. Results indicated no difference between language groups on cued recall, working memory, emotional responsiveness, or productive vocabulary, but a significant difference was found in the memory generalization condition with only the bilingual group outperforming the baseline control group. These results replicate and extend results from past studies (Brito and Barr, 2012, 2014; Brito et al., 2014) and suggest a bilingual advantage specific to memory generalization.