Learning to read two scripts at a young age is a demanding task. This study aims to develop games for building fundamental code-related emergent literacy skills among biscriptal preschoolers. We developed five games and tested them on a sample of 102 Chinese kindergarteners. The participants were aged 4 to 5 years and were learning English as a…

Despite growing interest in the studies on Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), its operation in the forms of individualized and group-wide has been controversial. To cast some empirical light on the issue, this study was designed to study the applicability of the two scenarios of ZPD-based instructions to the writing accuracy of two levels of…

Playing action video games has previously been linked to improvements in attentional control, the ability to choose what to attend and what to ignore that relies on a frontoparietal network of the brain. Here we asked whether action video game training would impact a range of mathematical abilities that rely on similar brain regions. Twenty-four…

Effective communication requires an understanding of the interlocutor's perspective. Being able to infer someone else's knowledge about a situation is a critical skill in any communication and social interaction. These abilities are part of Theory of Mind (ToM) skills and are known to be impaired in Down syndrome (DS). It therefore makes sense to…

This study examined (a) the identification of various reading groups across languages in Chinese (L1) adolescents learning English as a second language (ESL), in terms of their word-reading and reading comprehension skills, (b) overlap in reading group membership across languages, and (c) the performance of the various reading groups on…

We examined the effects of an adaptive phonological training program on the enhancement of 3 processing abilities--namely, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and phonological short-term memory--as well as word and pseudoword reading in Arabic-speaking children with dyslexia. We compared an experimental group (n = 20; mean age =…

Background: Outcomes of static tests provide an indication of what children have learned in the past, up to the moment of testing, and can therefore underestimate the cognitive abilities of atypically developing children, such as children with language difficulties. In contrast, dynamic tests aim to examine children's potential for learning. The…

E-learning strategies for the teaching unit Structure and States of Matter were developed. Students' achievements and the percentages of misconceptions were compared between experimental groups taught using web-based learning material (WBLM) used as homework after conventional teaching at school (EG1), and at school settings (EG2) with the control…

The conceptualization of giftedness continues to be a widely debated topic within the field. Recently, there has been a shift from a psychometric view of giftedness to inclusion of conative and contextual factors. How one defines and conceptualizes "gifted" drives assessment and identification practices. Conceptualization also guides the…

In the present study, 144 second- and 150 fourth-grade Chinese students were recruited to complete a Chinese character learning task to explore the specific contributions of sensory-motor components (i.e., visual, motor, and haptic systems) of handwriting to Chinese character learning. After matching for age, nonverbal IQ, and a series of…

The history of intellectual assessment with children and youth in Peru is presented from the foundation of scientific psychology in Peru until now. Current practices are affected by the multicultural ethnolinguistic diversity of the country, the quality of the different training programs, as well as by Peruvian regulations for becoming an academic…

Anthropocentrism and ecocentrism are two ways of understanding an extension of ethics to nature. In an anthropocentric ethic, nature deserves moral consideration because how nature is treated affects humans. In an ecocentric ethic, nature deserves moral consideration because nature has intrinsic value. Ecocentrism focuses on the biotic community…

Research into the effect of questions asked during storybook reading in preschool settings has rarely investigated questions that elicit higher order thinking. In the current study, Blank et al.'s Four Levels of Abstraction were used to code teacher questions and child responses from 177 individual storybook reading sessions with eight…

The current study aimed at exploring the impact of the modality in which numerical trainings proposed in kindergarten school. Participants were recruited from some Sardinian kindergarten schools and were then divided into three groups: a control group, which had to carry out the activities planned by the educational curriculum, and two…

The development of spelling skill is an intricate process for children with or at risk of Specific Learning Disabilities and requires targeted interventions. This problem exacerbates in the Greek orthographic system owning to its high complexity. The current study presents a novel spelling intervention program for Greek 3rd graders at risk of…