We explored the potential of a robotics application in education as a measurement tool of child executive functioning skills. Sixty-five kindergarteners received assignments to go through a maze with a programmable robot, the Bee-Bot. Via observation we quantified how they solved these tasks. Their performance was successfully aggregated into a…

Background: The Early Learning Outcomes Measure (ELOM) assesses early learning programme outcomes in children aged 50-69 months. ELOM assesses gross motor development (GMD), fine motor coordination and visual motor integration (FMC & VMI), emergent numeracy and mathematics (ENM), cognition and executive functioning (CEF), and emergent literacy…

Play is a powerful influence on children's learning and parents can provide opportunities to learn specific content by scaffolding children's play. Parent-child synchrony (i.e., harmony, reciprocity and responsiveness in interactions) is a component of parent-child interactions that is not well characterized in studies of play. We tested whether…

Aggression in early childhood has been found to predict future psychopathology, academic problems, and delinquency. In a sample of 136 mother-child pairs (M[subscript age] = 4 years, 11 months, SD = 11 months, 58% boys) associations among mothers' responding with distress to children's negative emotions, children's emotional control, and…

Research Findings: Optimal sleep is important for children's learning and development. "Sleep disordered breathing" (SDB) refers to a spectrum of conditions from simple snoring to obstructive sleep apnea that is common in childhood and interrupts sleep. We examined pathways between SDB and academic performance of children (N = 163, M…

Substantial evidence has established that individual differences in executive function (EF) in early childhood are uniquely predictive of children's academic readiness at school entry. The current study tested whether growth trajectories of EF across the early childhood period could be used to identify a subset of children who were at pronounced…

There is strong evidence that self-regulatory processes are linked to early academic skills, both concurrently and longitudinally. The majority of extant longitudinal studies, however, have been conducted using autoregressive techniques that may not accurately model change across time. The purpose of this study was to examine the unique…

At the beginning of preschool (M = 46 months of age), 197 (94 boys) children were administered tasks that assessed a suite of nonsymbolic and symbolic quantitative competencies as well as their executive functions, verbal and nonverbal intelligence, preliteracy skills, and their parents' education level. The children's mathematics achievement was…

This study tested whether individual executive function (EF) tasks were better characterized as formative or reflective indicators of the latent construct of EF. EF data that were collected as part of the Family Life Project (FLP), a prospective longitudinal study of families who were recruited at the birth of a new child (N = 1,292), when…

The role of executive function, specifically inhibitory control and generativity, in symbolic play was investigated in 20 children aged 48-89 months. Assessment of inhibitory control was via the Sun-Moon Stroop task, and generativity was assessed with the Semantic Fluency task, as well as a new object substitution task which required children to…

Attentional problems are commonly reported as a feature of the behavioural profile in both Williams syndrome (WS) and Down's syndrome (DS). Recent studies have begun to investigate these impairments empirically, acknowledging the need for an approach that considers cross-syndrome comparisons and developmental changes across the different component…