The roles of mathematical language and emergent literacy skills in the longitudinal prediction of specific early numeracy skills.

Mathematical language (i.e., content-specific language used in mathematics) and emergent literacy skills predict children's broad numeracy development. However, little work has examined whether these domains predict development of individual numeracy skills (e.g., cardinality, number order). Thus, the aim of the current study was to examine longitudinal relations among mathematical language, emergent literacy skills, and specific early numeracy skills. Participants included 114 preschool children aged 3.12 to 5.26 years (M = 4.17 years, SD = 0.59). Specifically, this study examined whether mathematical language and three emergent literacy skills (print knowledge, phonological awareness, and general vocabulary) in the fall of preschool predicted 12 individual early numeracy skills in the spring, controlling for age, sex, rapid automatized naming, parent education, and autoregressors. Results indicated that mathematical language predicted development of most of the early numeracy skills (e.g., set comparison, numeral comparison, numeral identification), but findings for emergent literacy skills were not robust. Among the three emergent literacy skills, only print knowledge was a significant predictor of development in some specific numeracy skills, including verbal counting, number order, and story problems. Results highlight the important role of mathematical language in children's numeracy development and provide the foundation for future work in designing interventions to improve early numeracy skills.

Home science interactions and their relation to children's science core knowledge in preschool.

A limited body of work has examined the nature and scope of young children's science-related activities outside of the school context, and thus there is little understanding or consensus regarding what comprises the home science environment (HSE; e.g., interactions, activities, resources) and how specific factors of the HSE relate to children's science performance. The two primary goals of this study were to (a) examine the factor structure of a parent-report measure of home science interactions and (b) evaluate how these factors relate to the science core knowledge of young children from families with low incomes. A total of 125 families with children aged 3 to 5 years (52 girls) participated in the study. Children were assessed on a measure of science core knowledge, and parents completed a brief questionnaire on their home science interactions that included questions pertaining to both home science disciplinary core idea (DCI) engagement and home science and engineering practice (SEP) engagement. Findings revealed that although separating home science interactions into distinct DCI and SEP factors represented the data well, the best overall representation of home science interactions was a one-factor model that included only home DCI engagement items. In addition, home DCI engagement was significantly predictive of children's science core knowledge over and above a large group of covariates, including children's age, race/ethnicity, sex, and performance on math, executive function, and vocabulary tasks as well as their parents' education.