An accumulating body of research suggests that the capacities children acquire that prepare them for learning in formal educational settings are multilevel and complex with multiple contributing factors that begin in infancy. A new U.S. longitudinal study, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), is designed to enable researchers to examine how an array of children's capacities and skills function individually and jointly to promote or hinder the acquisition of school readiness. The ECLS-B follows a nationally representative sample of 10,688 children born in the U.S. in 2001. Baseline data on the children and their families were collected at 9 months of age with follow-up at ages 2, 4, and kindergarten entry. Information on study children's socioemotional development is derived from several sources: videotaped mother-child interactions, parent interviews, and field staff observations. Because attachment is such an important indicator of children's socioemotional development during the toddler period, the study devoted considerable resources to designing an attachment measure. The Toddler Attachment Sort-45 (TAS-45) was designed to meet the need for a simple yet valid measure that did not require extensive training for field staff to administer easily. The TAS-45 generates the classical attachment categories and security and dependency scores.
The relationship between knowledge that organization during study facilitates performance (metamemory) and grouping pictures by semantic category was examined in a free recall task. Metamemory questioning occurred either before the task began or after the task was completed. On the basis of the Ericsson and Simon (1980) analysis of verbal report as data, it was hypothesized that metamemory-behavior relationships would first appear when the children were questioned after they had experienced the task. As predicted, metamemory was related to behavior in first grade, when the metamemory questioning occurred after the task. In fourth grade, metamemory was related to behavior whether questioned before or after the task. These results suggest that strategy awareness initially arises after reflection of one's own strategic behavior, and only later does strategy use result from planful, pretask activities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.