No abstract

Considerable research has examined interventions that facilitate school readiness skills in young children. One intervention, Red Light, Purple Light Circle Time Games (RLPL; Tominey and McClelland, 2011; Schmitt et al., 2015), includes music and movement games that aim to foster self-regulation skills. The present study (N = 157) focused on children from families with low-income and compared the RLPL intervention (SR) to a revised version of RLPL that included literacy and math content (SR+) and a Business-As-Usual (BAU) control group. In both versions of the intervention, teachers were trained to administer the self-regulation intervention in preschool classrooms with coaching support. Although not statistically significant, children receiving either version of the intervention gained more in self-regulation on the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS) over the preschool year compared to the BAU group (β = 0.09, p = 0.082, Cohen’s d = 0.31). Effect sizes were similar to previous studies (Schmitt et al., 2015; Duncan et al., 2018) and translated to a 21% difference in self-regulation over and above the BAU group at post-test. Furthermore, children participating in either version of the intervention gained significantly more in math across the school year compared to children in the BAU group (β = 0.14; p = 0.003, Cohen’s d = 0.38), which translated to a 24% difference in math over and above the BAU group at post-test. Results were somewhat stronger for the SR+ version, although effect sizes across intervention conditions were comparable. There were no statistically significant differences across groups for literacy skills. Results extend previous research and suggest that the RLPL intervention, which includes an explicit focus on self-regulation through music and movement games, may improve children’s self-regulation and math scores over the preschool year.

The measurement of self-regulation in young children has been a topic of great interest as researchers and practitioners work to help ensure that children have the skills they need to succeed as they start school. The present study examined how a revised version of a commonly used measure of behavioral self-regulation, the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task (HTKS) called the HTKS-R, and measures of executive function (EF) was related to academic outcomes between preschool and kindergarten (ages 4–6years) in a diverse sample of children from families with low income participating in Head Start in the United States. Participants included 318 children (53% female; 76% White; and 20% Latino/Hispanic) from 64 classrooms in 18 Head Start preschools who were followed over four time points between the fall of preschool and the spring of kindergarten. Results indicated that children with higher HTKS-R scores had significantly higher math and literacy scores at all-time points between preschool and kindergarten. The HTKS-R was also a more consistent predictor of math and literacy than individual EF measures assessing inhibitory control, working memory, and task shifting. Parallel process growth models indicated that children who had high initial scores on the HTKS-R also had relatively higher initial scores on math and literacy. In addition, growth in children’s scores on the HTKS-R across the preschool and kindergarten years was related to growth in both children’s math and literacy scores over the same period independent of their starting points on either measure. For the HTKS-R and math, children’s initial scores were negatively associated with growth over the preschool and kindergarten years indicating that lower skilled children at the start of preschool started to catch up to their more skilled peers by the end of kindergarten.

Children's ability to monitor subjective feelings of uncertainty (i.e., engage in uncertainty monitoring) is a central metacognitive skill. In the current study, we examined the development of uncertainty monitoring as well as its relations with vocabulary and executive function development in children (N = 137, 52% female) from predominately White and Latinx/Hispanic backgrounds when they were 4-6 years old and enrolled in a Head Start preschool and kindergarten between 2018 and 2019. We found that children's uncertainty monitoring improved during the kindergarten year. Children's executive function and vocabulary in preschool and vocabulary growth from preschool to kindergarten predicted uncertainty monitoring at the end of kindergarten, which sheds new light on potential mechanisms supporting children's metacognitive development.

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false‐belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false‐belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false‐belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false‐belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true‐belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true‐ and false‐belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true‐belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true‐belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English‐speakers. Children were recruited from university‐sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. ...