Examining the Interplay between the Cognitive and Emotional Aspects of Gender Differences in Spatial Processing.

Women reliably perform worse than men on measures of spatial ability, particularly those involving mental rotation. At the same time, females also report higher levels of spatial anxiety than males. What remains unclear, however, is whether and in what ways gender differences in these cognitive and affective aspects of spatial processing may be interrelated. Here, we tested for robust gender differences across six different datasets in spatial ability and spatial anxiety (N = 1257, 830 females). Further, we tested for bidirectional mediation effects. We identified indirect relations between gender and spatial skills through spatial anxiety, as well as between gender and spatial anxiety through spatial skills. In the gender → spatial anxiety → spatial ability direction, spatial anxiety explained an average of 22.4% of gender differences in spatial ability. In the gender → spatial ability → spatial anxiety direction, spatial ability explained an average of 25.9% of gender differences in spatial anxiety. Broadly, these results support a strong relation between cognitive and affective factors when explaining gender differences in the spatial domain. However, the nature of this relation may be more complex than has been assumed in previous literature. On a practical level, the results of this study caution the development of interventions to address gender differences in spatial processing which focus primarily on either spatial anxiety or spatial ability until such further research can be conducted. Our results also speak to the need for future longitudinal work to determine the precise mechanisms linking cognitive and affective factors in spatial processing.

"You need to be super smart to do well in math!" Young children's field-specific ability beliefs.

Success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is often believed to require intellectual talent ("brilliance"). Given that many cultures associate men more than women with brilliance, this belief poses an obstacle to women's STEM pursuits. Here, we investigated the developmental roots of this phenomenon, focusing specifically on young children's beliefs about math (N = 174 U.S. students in Grades 1-4; 93 girls, 81 boys; 52% White, 17% Asian, 13% Hispanic/Latinx). We found that field-specific ability beliefs (FABs) that associate success in math (vs. reading/writing) with brilliance are already present in early elementary school. We also found that brilliance-oriented FABs about math are negatively associated with elementary school students' (and particularly girls') math motivation-specifically, their math self-efficacy and interest. The early emergence of brilliance-oriented FABs about math and the negative relation between FABs and math motivation underscore the need to understand the sources and long-term effects of these beliefs. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Field-specific ability beliefs (FABs) are beliefs about the extent to which intellectual talent (or "brilliance") is required for success in a particular field or context. Among adults, brilliance-oriented FABs are an obstacle to diversity in science and technology, but the childhood antecedents of these beliefs are not well understood. The present study (N = 174) found that FABs that associate success in math (vs. reading/writing) with brilliance were already present in Grades 1-4. Brilliance-oriented FABs about math were negatively associated with elementary school students' (and particularly girls') math motivation-specifically, their math self-efficacy and interest.

Unlocking the Power of Gesture: Using Movement-Based Instruction to Improve First Grade Children's Spatial Unit Misconceptions.

Gestures are hand movements that are produced simultaneously with spoken language and can supplement it by representing semantic information, emphasizing important points, or showing spatial locations and relations. Gestures' specific features make them a promising tool to improve spatial thinking. Yet, there is recent work showing that not all learners benefit equally from gesture instruction and that this may be driven, in part, by children's difficulty understanding what an instructor's gesture is intended to represent. The current study directly compares instruction with gestures to instruction with plastic unit chips (Action) in a linear measurement learning paradigm aimed at teaching children the concept of spatial units. Some children performed only one type of movement, and some children performed both: Action-then-Gesture [AG] or Gesture-then-Action [GA]. Children learned most from the Gesture-then-Action [GA] and Action only [A] training conditions. After controlling for initial differences in learning, the gesture-then-action condition outperformed all three other training conditions on a transfer task. While gesture is cognitively challenging for some learners, that challenge may be desirable-immediately following gesture with a concrete representation to clarify that gesture's meaning is an especially effective way to unlock the power of this spatial tool and lead to deep, generalizable learning.

Parental intrusive homework support and math achievement: Does the child's mindset matter?

Prior research shows that when parents monitor, check, and assist in completing homework without an invitation, their children's motivation and academic achievement often decline. We propose that intrusive support from parents might also send the message that children are incompetent, especially if they believe their intelligence is fixed. We tested whether children's mindsets moderate the negative link between parents' intrusive homework support and achievement among first- and second-grade students followed for one academic year (Study 1, N = 563) and middle and high school students for two academic years (Study 2, N = 1,613). The samples were obtained from large urban areas in the United States. In both studies, intrusive homework support more strongly predicted a decrease in achievement over time for children with a fixed mindset. These findings suggest that the belief that intellectual ability cannot be changed may exacerbate the detrimental effects of uninvited help on academic work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Young children interpret number gestures differently than nonsymbolic sets.

Researchers have long been interested in the origins of humans' understanding of symbolic number, focusing primarily on how children learn the meanings of number words (e.g., "one", "two", etc.). However, recent evidence indicates that children learn the meanings of number gestures before learning number words. In the present set of experiments, we ask whether children's early knowledge of number gestures resembles their knowledge of nonsymbolic number. In four experiments, we show that preschool children (n = 139 in total; age M = 4.14 years, SD = 0.71, range = 2.75-6.20) do not view number gestures in the same the way that they view nonsymbolic representations of quantity (i.e., arrays of shapes), which opens the door for the possibility that young children view number gestures as symbolic, as adults and older children do. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/WtVziFN1yuI HIGHLIGHTS: Children were more accurate when enumerating briefly-presented number gestures than arrays of shapes, with a shallower decline in accuracy as quantities increased. We replicated this finding with arrays of shapes that were organized into neat, dice-like configurations (compared to the random configurations used in Experiment 1). The advantage in enumerating briefly-presented number gestures was evident before children had learned the cardinal principle. When gestures were digitally altered to pit handshape configuration against number of fingers extended, children overwhelmingly based their responses on handshape configuration.

Children's understanding of most is dependent on context.

Children struggle with the quantifier "most". Often, this difficulty is attributed to an inability to interpret most proportionally, with children instead relying on absolute quantity comparisons. However, recent research in proportional reasoning more generally has provided new insight into children's apparent difficulties, revealing that their overreliance on absolute amount is unique to contexts in which the absolute amount can be counted and interferes with proportional information. Across two experiments, we test whether 4- to 6-year-old children's interpretation of most is similarly dependent on the discreteness of the stimuli when comparing two different quantities (e.g., who ate most of their chocolate?) and when verifying whether a single amount can be described with the term most (e.g., is most of the butterfly colored in?). We find that children's interpretation of most does depend on the stimulus format. When choosing between absolutely more vs. proportionally more as depicting most, children showed stronger absolute-based errors with discrete stimuli than continuous stimuli, and by 6-years-old were able to reason proportionally with continuous stimuli, despite still demonstrating strong absolute interference with discrete stimuli. In contrast, children's yes/no judgements of single amounts, where conflicting absolute information is not a factor, showed a weaker understanding of most for continuous stimuli than for discrete stimuli. Together, these results suggest that children's difficulty with most is more nuanced than previously understood: it depends on the format and availability of proportional vs. absolute amounts and develops substantially from 4- to 6-years-old.

Connecting symbolic fractions to their underlying proportions using iterative partitioning.

Fractions are a challenging mathematics topic for many elementary and middle school students, and even for adults. However, a growing body of developmental research suggests that young children can reason about visually presented proportions, well before fraction instruction, providing insight into how fractions might be introduced to improve learning. We designed a card game to teach first and second grade children (N = 195, including a racially and economically diverse sample from the United States) about fractions in one of three ways. In the Actively Divided condition we iteratively divided an area model into equal-sized units, in the Predivided condition we used an area model with the end-state of the Actively Divided condition, and in the Nondivided condition we used a continuous representation of the fraction magnitude that was not divided into unit-sized parts. Children in the actively divided condition demonstrated larger improvements matching symbolic fractions and visual fractions (i.e., pie charts) than children in the other two conditions. Posthoc analyses of children's gameplay revealed that the actively divided condition may have provided a more optimal level of difficulty for young children than the predivided condition, which was particularly difficult, and the nondivided condition, which was trivially easy. These differences in gameplay performance provide insights into possible mechanisms for our results. We discuss open research questions highlighted by this work and implications of these findings for both the development of proportional reasoning and fraction learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Effort(less) exam preparation: Math anxiety predicts the avoidance of effortful study strategies.

Previous research suggests that math anxiety, or feelings of apprehension about math, leads individuals to engage in math avoidance behaviors that negatively impact their future math performance. However, much of the research on this topic explores global avoidance behaviors in situations where math can be avoided entirely rather than more localized avoidance behaviors that occur within a mathematics context. Since the option to completely avoid math is not common in most formal education systems, we investigated how and if math avoidance behaviors manifest for math-anxious high school students enrolled in math courses. Given previous research highlighting the utility of effortful study strategies as well as recent findings identifying a relation between math anxiety and the avoidance of math-related effort, we hypothesized that math anxiety would be associated with decreased planned engagement of effortful study strategies by students and that such effort avoidance would result in worse performance on a high-stakes mathematics exam. We found (N = 190) that the majority of students ranked problem-solving as the most effortful study strategy and that math anxiety was associated with less planned engagement with effortful problem-solving during studying. Moreover, the avoidance of effortful problem-solving engagement partially mediated the association between math anxiety and exam performance, marking it as a potential target for intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Spatial and mathematics skills: Similarities and differences related to age, SES, and gender.

Performance on a range of spatial and mathematics tasks was measured in a sample of 1592 students in kindergarten, third grade, and sixth grade. In a previously published analysis of these data, performance was analyzed by grade only. In the present analyses, we examined whether the relations between spatial skill and mathematics skill differed across socio-economic levels, for boys versus girls, or both. Our first aim was to test for group differences in spatial skill and mathematics skill. We found that children from higher income families showed significantly better performance on both spatial and mathematics measures, and boys outperformed girls on spatial measures in all three grades, but only outperformed girls on mathematics measures in kindergarten. Further, comparisons using factor analysis indicated that the income-related gap in mathematics performance increased across the grade levels, while the income-related gap in spatial performance remained constant. Our second aim was to test whether spatial skill mediated any of these effects, and we found that it did, either partially or fully, in all four cases. Our third aim was to test whether the "separate but correlated" two-factor latent structure previously reported for spatial skill and mathematics skill was (Mix et al., 2016; Mix et al., 2017) replicated across grade, SES, and sex. Multi-group confirmatory factor analyses conducted for each of these subgroups indicated that the same latent structure was present, despite differences in overall performance. These findings replicate and extend prior work on SES and sex differences related to spatial and mathematics skill, but provide evidence that the relations between the domains are stable and consistent across subgroups.

Socioeconomic Variations in the Frequency of Parent Number Talk: A Meta-Analysis.

Using data from 12 studies, we meta-analyze correlations between parent number talk during interactions with their young children (mean sample age ranging from 22 to 79 months) and two aspects of family socioeconomics, parent education, and family income. Potential variations in correlation sizes as a function of study characteristics were explored. Statistically significant positive correlations were found between the amount of number talk in parent-child interactions and both parent education and family income (i.e., r = 0.12 for education and 0.14 for income). Exploratory moderator analyses provided some preliminary evidence that child age, as well as the average level of and variability in socioeconomic status, may moderate effect sizes. The implications of these findings are discussed with special attention to interpreting the practical importance of the effect sizes in light of family strengths and debate surrounding "word gaps".

Personal narrative as a 'breeding ground' for higher-order thinking talk in early parent-child interactions.

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experiences about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations-i.e., to engage in higher-order thinking talk (HOTT). Here we ask whether narratives in early parent-child interactions include proportionally more HOTT than other forms of everyday home language. Sixty-four children (31 girls; 36 White, 14 Black, 8 Hispanic, 6 mixed/other race) and their primary caregiver(s) (M income = $61,000) were recorded in 90-minute spontaneous home interactions every 4 months from 14-58 months. Speech was transcribed and coded for narrative and HOTT. We found that parents at all visits and children after 38 months used more HOTT in narrative than non-narrative, and more HOTT than expected by chance. At 38- and 50-months, we examined HOTT in a related but distinct form of decontextualized talk-pretend, or talk during imaginary episodes of interaction-as a control to test whether other forms of decontextualized talk also relate to HOTT. While pretend contained more HOTT than other (non-narrative/non-pretend) talk, it generally contained less HOTT than narrative. Additionally, unlike HOTT during narrative, the amount of HOTT during pretend did not exceed the amount expected by chance, suggesting narrative serves as a particularly rich 'breeding ground' for HOTT in parent-child interactions. These findings provide insight into the nature of narrative discourse, and suggest narrative potentially may be used as a lever to increase children's higher-order thinking.

Parent math anxiety predicts early number talk.

Differences in children's math knowledge emerge as early as the start of kindergarten, and persist throughout schooling. Previous research implicates the importance of early parent number talk in the development of math competency. Yet we understand little about the factors that relate to variation in early parent number talk. The current study examined the relation of parent math anxiety and family socioeconomic status (SES) to parent number talk with children under the age of three (n = 36 dyads). For the first time, we show preliminary evidence that parent math anxiety (MA) predicts the amount of number talk children hear at home, beyond differences accounted for by SES. We also found a significant SES by parent MA interaction such that parent MA was predictive of higher-SES parents' number talk but not that of lower-SES parents. Furthermore, we found that these relations were specific to parents' cardinal number talk (but not counting), which has been shown to be particularly important in children's math development.

Facilitating young children's numeracy talk in play: The role of parent prompts.

Previous research has demonstrated the contribution of parents' number language to children's own engagement with numbers and later mathematical achievement. Although there is evidence that both the quantity and complexity of parent number talk contribute to children's math learning, it is unclear whether different forms of parents' number talk-statements versus prompts-offer unique contributions to how children engage in math. We examined parent number talk among 50 dyads of parents and 2- to 4-year-olds during pretend play, coding parents' provisions of informative number statements and prompts inviting children to engage in number talk. The total amount (tokens) and diversity (types) of children's number words were analyzed separately. Parents' number utterances, particularly prompts about number, were infrequent. Both parents' number statements and their prompts were uniquely related to children's number word tokens. Only prompts were associated with children's number word types. Follow-up analyses indicated that prompts were associated with lengthier parent-child conversations about number than parent statements and that children used larger number words when responding to parent prompts than when they themselves initiated number talk. These findings highlight the importance of parents' prompts for enhancing the quality of parent-child math exchanges by providing opportunities for children to advance their current use of numerical language. Consequently, parents' use of number-related prompts may play an important role in children's early math engagement.

Elementary school teachers' math anxiety and students' math learning: A large-scale replication.

A solid foundation in math is important for children's long-term academic success. Many factors influence children's math learning-including the math content students are taught in school, the quality of their instruction, and the math attitudes of students' teachers. Using a large and diverse sample of first-grade students (n = 551), we conducted a large-scale replication of a previous study (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 2010, 1860; n = 117), which found that girls in classes with highly math anxious teachers learned less math during the school year, as compared to girls whose math teachers were less anxious about math. With a larger sample, we found a negative relation between teachers' math anxiety and students' math achievement for both girls and boys, even after accounting for teachers' math ability and children's beginning of year math knowledge, replicating and extending those previous results. Our findings strengthen the support for the hypothesis that teachers' math anxiety is one factor that undermines children's math learning and could push students off-track during their initial exposure to math in early elementary school.

Causal Effects of Parent Number Talk on Preschoolers' Number Knowledge.

Individual differences in children's number knowledge arise early and are associated with variation in parents' number talk. However, there exists little experimental evidence of a causal link between parent number talk and children's number knowledge. Parent number talk was manipulated by creating picture books which parents were asked to read with their children every day for 4 weeks. N = 100 two- to four-year olds and their parents were randomly assigned to read either Small Number (1-3), Large Number (4-6), or Control (non-numerical) books. Small Number books were particularly effective in promoting number knowledge relative to the Control books. However, children who began the study further along in their number development also benefited from reading the Large Number Books with their parents.

Longitudinally adaptive assessment and instruction increase numerical skills of preschool children.

Social inequality in mathematical skill is apparent at kindergarten entry and persists during elementary school. To level the playing field, we trained teachers to assess children's numerical and spatial skills every 10 wk. Each assessment provided teachers with information about a child's growth trajectory on each skill, information designed to help them evaluate their students' progress, reflect on past instruction, and strategize for the next phase of instruction. A key constraint is that teachers have limited time to assess individual students. To maximize the information provided by an assessment, we adapted the difficulty of each assessment based on each child's age and accumulated evidence about the child's skills. Children in classrooms of 24 trained teachers scored 0.29 SD higher on numerical skills at posttest than children in 25 randomly assigned control classrooms (P = 0.005). We observed no effect on spatial skills. The intervention also positively influenced children's verbal comprehension skills (0.28 SD higher at posttest, P < 0.001), but did not affect their print-literacy skills. We consider the potential contribution of this approach, in combination with similar regimes of assessment and instruction in elementary schools, to the reduction of social inequality in numerical skill and discuss possible explanations for the absence of an effect on spatial skills.

Giving a larger amount or a larger proportion: Stimulus format impacts children's social evaluations.

Young children show remarkably sophisticated abilities to evaluate others. Yet their abilities to engage in proportional moral evaluation undergoes protracted development. Namely, young children evaluate someone who shares absolutely more as being "nicer" than someone who shares proportionally more (e.g., sharing 3-out-of-6 is nicer than sharing 2-out-of-3, because 3 > 2, even though 3/6 < 2/3), whereas adults think the opposite. We investigate the hypothesis that this prior work underestimates children's proportional social reasoning by relying on discrete and spatially separated quantities (e.g., individual stickers), which can hinder proportional reasoning even outside social contexts. In three experiments we examine whether 4- and 5-year-old children's social evaluations are impacted by the discreteness and spatial separation of the resource and compare their behavior to adults (18 to 63 years; across all samples: 38% girls/women, 62% boys/men; no other demographic data was collected). We find that children are sensitive to these features: when the resource was divided into discrete units (Experiment 1) or spatially separated (Experiment 2) children were more likely to use absolute amount, as opposed to proportion, relative to when the resources were not divided and remained spatially connected. However, adults were highly sensitive to proportion regardless of the display's perceptual features (Experiment 3), and children's use of proportion remained below adult-levels. These results suggest that perceptual features influence children's use of absolute versus proportional information in their social evaluations, which has theoretical and methodological implications for understanding children's conceptions of fairness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The origins of higher-order thinking lie in children's spontaneous talk across the pre-school years.

Higher-order thinking is relational reasoning in which multiple representations are linked together, through inferences, comparisons, abstractions, and hierarchies. We examine the development of higher-order thinking in 64 preschool-aged children, observed from 14 to 58 months in naturalistic situations at home. We used children's spontaneous talk about and with relations (i.e., higher-order thinking talk, or HOTT) as a window onto their higher-order thinking skills. We find that surface HOTT, in which relations between representations are more immediate and easily perceptible, appears before-and is far more frequent than-structure HOTT, in which relations between representations are more abstract and less easy to perceive. Child-specific factors (including early vocabulary and gesture use, first-born status, and family income) predict differences in children's onset (i.e., age of acquisition) of HOTT and its trajectory of use across development. Although HOTT utterances tend to be longer and more syntactically complex than non-HOTT utterances, HOTT frequently appears in non-complex utterances, and a substantial proportion of children achieve complex utterance onset prior to the onset of HOTT. This finding suggests that complex language is neither necessary nor sufficient for HOTT to occur; other factors above and beyond complex linguistic skills are involved in the onset and use of higher-order thinking. Finally, we found that the trajectory of HOTT, particularly structure HOTT-but not complex utterances-during the preschool period predicts standardized outcome measures of inference and analogy skills in grade school, which underscores the crucial role that this kind of early talk plays for later outcomes.

Language development and brain reorganization in a child born without the left hemisphere.

We present a case of a 14-year-old girl born without the left hemisphere due to prenatal left internal carotid occlusion. We combined longitudinal language and cognitive assessments with functional and structural neuroimaging data to situate the case within age-matched, typically developing children. Despite having had a delay in getting language off the ground during the preschool years, our case performed within the normal range on a variety of standardized language tests, and exceptionally well on phonology and word reading, during the elementary and middle school years. Moreover, her spatial, number, and reasoning skills also fell in the average to above-average range based on assessments during these time periods. Functional MRI data revealed activation in right fronto-temporal areas when listening to short stories, resembling the bilateral activation patterns in age-matched typically developing children. Diffusion MRI data showed significantly larger dorsal white matter association tracts (the direct and anterior segments of the arcuate fasciculus) connecting areas active during language processing in her remaining right hemisphere, compared to either hemisphere in control children. We hypothesize that these changes in functional and structural brain organization are the result of compensatory brain plasticity, manifesting in unusually large right dorsal tracts, and exceptional performance in phonology, speech repetition, and decoding. More specifically, we posit that our case's large white matter connections might have played a compensatory role by providing fast and reliable transfer of information between cortical areas for language in the right hemisphere.

Breaking down gesture and action in mental rotation: Understanding the components of movement that promote learning.

Past research has shown that children's mental rotation skills are malleable and can be improved through action experience-physically rotating objects-or gesture experience-showing how objects could rotate (e.g., Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013; Goldin-Meadow et al., 2012; Levine, Goldin-Meadow, Carlson, & Hemani-Lopez, 2018). These two types of movements both involve rotation, but differ on a number of components. Here, we break down action and gesture into components-feeling an object during rotation, using a grasping handshape during rotation, tracing the trajectory of rotation, and seeing the outcome of rotation-and ask, in two studies, how training children on a mental rotation task through different combinations of these components impacts learning gains across a delay. Our results extend the literature by showing that, although all children benefit from training experiences, some training experiences are more beneficial than others, and the pattern differs by sex. Not seeing the outcome of rotation emerged as a crucial training component for both males and females. However, not seeing the outcome turned out to be the only necessary component for males (who showed equivalent gains when imagining or gesturing object rotation). Females, in contrast, only benefitted from not seeing the outcome when it involved producing a relevant motor movement (i.e., when gesturing the rotation of the object and not simply imagining the rotation of the object). Results are discussed in relation to potential mechanisms driving these effects and practical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).