The problem-solving strategies of kindergarten and first-grade children during discrimination learning

Kindergarten and first-grade children (6 and 7 years of age, respectively) were given specially designed discrimination tasks with introtact probes preceding each trial. One group (CON) was given the criterion task without prior training. A second group (LTL) received three pretraining tasks of the same type as the criterion task. A third group (HYP) received the same pretraining tasks, but with explicit instructions designed to teach a simple hypothesis-testing strategy. Several indices, designed to reflect the use of win-stay and lose-shift rules, as well as memory for disconfirmed hypotheses, were computed from the protocols of the criterion task. The indices for Group CON suggested that most of these children were using a guessing strategy that involved quite frequent changes in hypotheses. Moreover, many of these children restricted their hypotheses to the irrelevant cues. The indices for Group LTL revealed a spontaneous use of the hypothesis-testing strategy by nearly half of the children. The results for Group HYP indicated that over four-fifths of these children became highly efficient in the use of the problem-solving strategy.     

Cognitive profiles and deviation patterns of dyslexic children.

Cognitive profiles of 20 dyslexic children were examined using a battery of neuropsychological tests. Their ages ranged from 90 to 114 mo. (M = 106.6 mo.). Intelligence and reading comprehension were normal, but the subjects had specific problems in decoding written material. These subjects were matched with a control group of same age, sex, and sociocultural status. The dyslexic children presented specific patterns of response on WISC-R subtests and failed a battery of cognitive tests examining subcomponents of reading. For each child, a deviation score was computed which represented the imbalance among the different cognitive functions. Greater imbalance was observed among the dyslexic children in development of cognitive functions than among the normal children.     

Effects of maternal employment on kindergarten and first-grade children's vocational aspirations

Relationships between young boys' and girls' occupational choices and their mothers' vocational participation were explored. Employment status and occupation were obtained for parents of 142 kindergarten and first-grade children attending public schools in an upper-middle-class community. A scale derived from the United States Census was used to score parents' occupations and children's occupational choices for sex-stereotyping. Results indicated that children whose mothers were currently employed chose a greater number of occupations and more masculine-oriented occupations than did children of nonemployed mothers. Girls whose mothers had selected nontraditional fields also tended to aspire to less sextraditional careers. A trend in this direction was also noted for boys. Significant differences were found between girls and boys for types of occupations selected, but not for numbers of vocational choices.This article is based on a reanalysis of data gathered for a doctoral dissertation submitted to Fordham University. The author would like to thank her advisor, Dr. Toby Tetenbaum, for help on various aspects of this study, and Dr. Sherle Boone and Dr. Alberto Montare for their useful comments.     

LEXIN: A lexical database from Spanish kindergarten and first-grade readers

The LEXIN database offers psycholinguistic indexes of the 13,184 different words (types) computed from 178,839 occurrences of these words (tokens) contained in a corpus of 134 beginning readers widely used in Spain. This database provides four statistical indicators: F (overall word frequency), D (index of dispersion across selected readers), U (estimated frequency per million words), and SFI (standard frequency index). It also gives information about the number of letters, syntactic category, and syllabic structure of the words included. To facilitate comparisons, LEXIN provides data from LEXESP’s (Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, Cuetos, & Carreiras, 2000), Alameda and Cuetos’s (1995), and Martínez and García’s (2004) Spanish adult psycholinguistic frequency databases. Access to the LEXIN database is facilitated by a computer program. The LEXIN program allows for the creation of word lists by letting the user specify searching criteria. LEXIN can be useful for researchers in cognitive psychology, particularly in the areas of psycholinguistics and education.     

Physique and personality in kindergarten children

Ectomorphy scores were not associated with cerebrotonia scores in a sample of 105 kindergarten children.     

The significance of self-reported anxious symptoms in first-grade children

It is generally believed that prior to the middle to late elementary school years children's reports of anxious symptoms represent nothing more than transient developmental phenomena. In light of the limited empirical study of this issue and its import to the allocation of mental health resources, the present study seeks to provide empirical evidence of the significance of anxious symptoms in children younger than 7. Specifically, utilizing an epidemiologically defined population of 1197 first-grade children, followed longitudinally from the fall to spring of first grade, we examine the stability, prevalence and caseness of children's self-reports of anxious symptoms. Self-reported anxious symptoms proved relatively stable over 4-month test-retest interval. In addition, they appeared to have a significant impact on academic functioning in terms of reading achievement. These findings on stability, caseness, and prevalence suggest children's self-reported anxious symptoms in the early elementary school years may have clinical significance. However, further study is necessary before firm conclusions can be drawn.     

Cognitive abilities profiles of Caucasian vs Japanese subjects in the Hawaii Family Study of Cognition

General intelligence (the unrotated first principal component) was partialled out of the cognitive abilities factors—verbal ability, spatial ability, perceptual speed, and visual memory—obtained for the 15 tests of cognitive abilities used in the Hawaii Family Study of Cognition (HFSC). The resulting cognitive abilities profiles indicated that HFSC subjects of Caucasian ancestry scored higher relative to subjects of Japanese ancestry on the verbal and visual memory factors, but lower on the spatial and perceptual speed factors. This ethnic group difference in the shape of the cognitive abilities profiles was found to be highly consistent across sexes and generations, in spite of the large mean differences across these groups in factor scores.     

Teaching directional skills to preschool and kindergarten children

Studied a new device and training procedure for teaching the directional orientation and sentence tracking skills used in reading and writing western languages. Twelve preschool and 14 kindergarten children were randomly assigned to E and C groups. Between pre- and posttests, Es practiced for a total of 20 min. over a two-week period with an electronic device which flashed a correct signal only when S scribed left-to-right through successive sentences from top to bottom of the display. Any error in sequence extinguished the signal. Cs received only pre- and posttests. On test sentences prior to practice neither Es nor Cs were able to show where the sentences began or how they went from beginning to end. After using the device, Es tripled their orientation and tracking scores, while Cs not given access to the device did not improve (p < .002). Left-right and up-down directional confusion, often the subject of many hours of remedial training, were shown to be rapidly corrected in normal children by the use of a simple electronic device providing clear feedback distinguishing correct from incorrect responses. Implications for prereading instruction are discussed.     

Friendship competence in kindergarten and primary school children

Aim of this study was to confirm the increase of friendship competence and its multifactorial nature in kindergarten and primary school children and to verify gender differences, parenting and socioeconomic status influences on friendship concept. A semi-structured interview was administered in a natural context to 3–8 years-old children (N = 99; mean = 6.1 years; SD = 1.35). The coding provides five sub-categories: (1) friendship; (2) social perspective taking; (3) emotions understanding; (4) social interaction strategies; (5) aggressiveness. Three parental style questionnaires were administrated to parents. Results confirm the increasing of friendship competence according to age. No gender difference was found. Father's involvement in son's activities was inversely correlated with son's aggressivity.     

Sleep patterns and sleep disruptions in kindergarten children

Assessed sleep patterns and sleep disruptions in kindergarten children and investigated the relation between sleep measures derived from objective and subjective evaluation methods. The sleep patterns of 59 normal kindergarten children (mean age = 5.5 years) were monitored for 4 to 5 consecutive nights by means of activity monitors (actigraph) and by means of parental daily sleep logs. The correlation between the actigraphic measures and the daily parental logs indicated that parents were accurate reporters of sleep schedule measures. However, parents were less accurate in assessing sleep quality measures, significantly underestimating the number of night-wakings and overestimating the quality of their children's sleep. Fragmented sleep was found, by means of activity monitoring, in 41% of the children.     

Longitudinal stability of pre‐reading skill profiles of kindergarten children: implications for early screening and theories of reading

Research suggests that early identification of developmental dyslexia is important for mitigating the negative effects of dyslexia, including reduced educational attainment and increased socioemotional difficulties. The strongest pre‐literacy predictors of dyslexia are rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological awareness (PA), letter knowledge, and verbal short‐term memory. The relationship among these constructs has been debated, and several theories have emerged to explain the unique role of each in reading ability/disability. Furthermore, the stability of identification of risk based on these measures varies widely across studies, due in part to the different cut‐offs employed to designate risk. We applied a latent profile analysis technique with a diverse sample of 1215 kindergarten and pre‐kindergarten students from 20 schools, to investigate whether PA, RAN, letter knowledge, and verbal short‐term memory measures differentiated between homogenous profiles of performance on these measures. Six profiles of performance emerged from the data: average performers, below average performers, high performers, PA risk, RAN risk, and double‐deficit risk (both PA and RAN). A latent class regression model was employed to investigate the longitudinal stability of these groups in a representative subset of children (n = 95) nearly two years later, at the end of 1st grade. Profile membership in the spring semester of pre‐kindergarten or fall semester of kindergarten was significantly predictive of later reading performance, with the specific patterns of performance on the different constructs remaining stable across the years. There was a higher frequency of PA and RAN deficits in children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. There was no evidence for the IQ–achievement discrepancy criterion traditionally used to diagnose dyslexia. Our results support the feasibility of early identification of dyslexia risk and point to the heterogeneity of risk profiles. These findings carry important implications for improving outcomes for children with dyslexia, based on more targeted interventions.     

Neurocognitive correlates of socioeconomic status in kindergarten children

Socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly associated with cognitive ability and achievement during childhood and beyond. Little is known about the developmental relationships between SES and specific brain systems or their associated cognitive functions. In this study we assessed neurocognitive functioning of kindergarteners from different socioeconomic backgrounds, using tasks drawn from the cognitive neuroscience literature in order to determine how childhood SES predicts the normal variance in performance across different neurocognitive systems. Five neurocognitive systems were examined: the occipitotemporal/visual cognition system, the parietal/spatial cognition system, the medial temporal/memory system, the left perisylvian/language system, and the prefrontal/executive system. SES was disproportionately associated with the last two, with low SES children performing worse than middle SES children on most measures of these systems. Relations among language, executive function, SES and specific aspects of early childhood experience were explored, revealing intercorrelations and a seemingly predominant role of individual differences in language ability involved in SES associations with executive function.     

Cognitive tempo in children and their parents.

An adoption study was conducted to determine if cognitive tempo (as characterized by errors and latencies on the Matching Familiar Figures Test) is more similar between parents and their biological children or between parents and their adopted children. Zero-order correlations between parents and children were not significant (regardless of familial relationship), but the results of canonical correlations for mean of parents' scores with those of biological and adopted children respectively were consonant with hypothesized values, suggesting a degree of heritability exists. A slight trend for parents' latency to be consistently related to their biological children's latency was noted, but no such trend was present for errors. The heritability of latency versus errors in cognitive tempo is discussed.     

Spatial role-taking ability among bilingual and monolingual kindergarten children

Fifty-seven children enrolled in a bilingual Spanish kindergarten program, assigned to appropriate language and age-related groups, were shown a graduated sequence of increasingly complex arrangements of multicolored blocks and were asked to judge how the original arrangement would look from the opposite and the side perspectives. A series of 2(younger vs. older) x 3(Spanish Monolingual vs. English Monolingual vs. Spanish-English Bilingual) ANOVAs for each of the types of responses (correct, incorrect, egocentric) showed a significant main effect for age on the incorrect answers. No differences associated with egocentrism were obtained. There was no relationship between age and success with simple and complex spatial tasks. As opposed to other studies that suggest certain cognitive advantages for young bilingual children, this study indicates no perceptible differences associated with being monolingual or bilingual at the ages of 5 and 6 for spatial tasks.