Background: In several countries, children's math skills have been declining at an alarming rate in recent years and decades, and one of the explanations for this alarming situation is that children have difficulties in establishing the relations between arithmetical operations. Aim: In order to address this question, our goal was to determine the…

The purpose of this follow-up study was to determine the specific contribution of phonological processing abilities, including phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM), as well as visual perception (VP), in word reading accuracy. A sample of 62 native Arabic speaking children from Grade 1…

Spatial skills have been consistently linked to mathematics achievement in older students and adults, but we know little about their relationship to mathematics achievement in elementary school. This study examined how spatial skills influenced the development of number sense, and subsequent mathematics competency, as students progressed from the…

This study explored mathematics anxiety in a longitudinal sample of 113 children followed from second to third grade. We examined how mathematics anxiety related to different types of mathematical performance concurrently and longitudinally and whether the relations between mathematics anxiety and mathematical performance differed as a function of…

We examined the role of executive attention, which encompasses the common aspects of executive function and executive working memory, in children's acquisition of two aspects of mathematical skill: (a) knowledge of the number system (e.g., place value) and of arithmetic procedures (e.g., multi-digit addition) and (b) arithmetic fluency (i.e.,…

The study's goal was to identify the beginning of 1st grade quantitative competencies that predict mathematics achievement start point and growth through 5th grade. Measures of number, counting, and arithmetic competencies were administered in early 1st grade and used to predict mathematics achievement through 5th (n = 177), while controlling for…

In the past years, an increasing number of studies have investigated executive functions as predictors of individual differences in mathematical abilities. The present longitudinal study was designed to investigate whether the executive functions shifting, inhibition, and working memory differ between low achieving and typically achieving children…

Calculation fluency weaknesses are a key characteristic of children with mathematics difficulties. The major aim of this dissertation was to uncover early predictors of calculation fluency weaknesses in second graders. Children's performance on number sense tasks in kindergarten along with general cognitive abilities, early literacy skills, and…

The contribution of the three core components of working memory (WM) to the development of mathematical skills in young children is poorly understood. The relation between specific WM components and Numerical Operations, which emphasize computation and fact retrieval, and Mathematical Reasoning, which emphasizes verbal problem solving abilities in…

After explicit spelling instruction, low achieving second grade spellers increased the number of correctly spelled words during composing but differed in response trajectories. Class 1 (low initial and slow growth) had the lowest initial performance and improved at a relatively slow rate. Class 2 (high initial and fast growth) started higher than…

The authors examined (a) the extent to which kindergarten estimates of core language functions predicted teacher ratings of behavior problems in each of the child's first 4 years of elementary school and (b) the ability of core language measures to predict concurrent behavior problems at each of the early elementary school grades studied.…