Growing up with multiple siblings might negatively affect language development. This study examined the associations between birth order, sibling characteristics and parent-reported vocabulary size in 6163 Norwegian 8- to 36-month-old children (51.4% female). Results confirmed that birth order was negatively associated with vocabulary, yet…

Timing of foster care placement, especially early in life, may have important implications for children's later academic functioning. Given racial disparities in placement decisions, examining associations between age at foster care entry and school outcomes by race is warranted. To address this gap, linked, longitudinal administrative data were…

This longitudinal study examined age- and gender-related differences in autobiographical memory about the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and whether the content of these memories predicted psychological adjustment over time. A sample of 247 students (M[subscript age] = 11.94, range 8-16 years, 51.4% female, 85.4% White) was recruited from public and…

This meta-analysis examined main effects and heterogeneity in associations between popularity and academic adjustment in the U.S. and China across 41 studies. The aggregated sample included 22,151 children and adolescents (10,934 boys; 11,217 girls) from both countries, with U.S. students from various ethnic backgrounds. Results in the U.S. were…

Adjusting practice to different goals and characteristics is key to learning, but its development remains unclear. Across 2 preregistered experiments, 190 4-to-8-year-olds (106 female; mostly White; data collection: December 2021-September 2022) and 31 adults played an easy and a difficult game, then chose one to practice before a test on either…

Children's evaluations of empathizers were examined using vignette-based tasks (N = 159 4- to 7-year-old U.S. children, 82 girls, 52% White) between March 2023 and March 2024. Children typically evaluated empathizers positively compared to less empathic others. They rated empathic responses as more appropriate, selected empathizers as nicer, and…

When determining what others know, we intuitively consider not only whether they succeed but also their probability of success in the absence of knowledge (e.g., random guessing). Across three experiments (n = 240 North American 4-6-year-olds, data collected between 2020-2023) we find that 4-year-olds understand that tasks with a lower probability…

Australian children aged 6-9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target…

This study examined children's self-assessment of their prosociality, relative to average peers, in situations where the recipient is described as "needy" versus "not needy" (at a school of average socioeconomic level in south Israel; N = 158; aged 6-12 years; 51% males, December-May 2021). The results show that older children…

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Class of 2011 (n = 14,370; 51% Male; 51% White; 14% Black; 25% Hispanic; 4% Asian; and 6% Other), this study examined the cumulative, timing-specific, and enduring associations between student-teacher relationships in the United States and a broad range of student outcomes.…

Need for cognition (NFC) reflects the tendency to enjoy and engage in cognitive challenges. This study examines the relations between NFC and academic interest among 922 German secondary school students (academic track) assessed four times in Grades 5-7 (initial age M = 10.63, SD = 0.55; 41% female; 90% first language German) in mathematics,…

This study investigated the development of educational aspirations (EAs) among Chinese youth (n = 2228, 48.61% female, 87.66% Han, M[subscript age_2010] = 11.48 years) for 6 years. Five latent classes of EA trajectories were identified. They varied greatly during early adolescence but converged around an associate degree in middle adolescence and…

Theoretical work has suggested close associations between morphological awareness (MA) and reading skills in Chinese; however, the nature and direction of these time-ordered links are little known. This study examined the interplays of MA and reading skills using a continuous-time modeling approach to three waves of two-year longitudinal data from…

Children with disabilities often receive accommodations, but teachers rarely explain them to typically-developing (TD) classmates. How do TD students reason about these accommodations and evaluate their fairness? Five-, seven-, and nine-year-olds from the United States (N = 122; 50% female; 87.7% white; data collected April 2022-September 2023)…

Neural specialization for print can be indexed by the left-lateralized N1 response as a tuning gradient to visual words, indicated by sensitivity (character vs. visual control) and selectivity (character vs. character-like stimuli). Forty-five Chinese children (20 boys) were recorded with EEG twice with a 2-year interval during a character…