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The home numeracy environment (i.e., parents' numeracy expectations and activities), is related to early numeracy in young children. As recent studies have shown that both cognitive and linguistic factors play an important role in predicting numeracy development, it may be assumed that rather than the home numeracy environment, the home literacy environment predicts early numeracy. The present study examined this hypothesis by focusing on the specificity of the home numeracy environment. In a sample of 60 kindergartners, we assessed cognitive (nonverbal reasoning, working memory) and linguistic abilities (phonological awareness, grammatical skills), as well as early numeracy skills, while exploring their home literacy environment and home numeracy environment from parent questionnaires. We found that home numeracy environment predicted early numeracy skills, after controlling for child factors and home literacy environment. The home numeracy environment can be seen as a unique factor in the home environment in predicting numeracy outcomes.

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Background. Executive functions have been proposed to account for individual variation in reading comprehension beyond the contributions of decoding skills and language skills. However, insight into the direct and indirect effects of multiple executive functions on fifthgrade reading comprehension, while accounting for decoding and language skills, is limited. Aim. The present study investigated the direct and indirect effects of fourth-grade executive functions (i.e., working memory, inhibition, and planning) on fifth-grade reading comprehension, after accounting for decoding and language skills. Sample. The sample included 113 fourth-grade children (including 65 boys and 48 girls; Age M = 9.89; SD = .44 years). Methods. The participants were tested on their executive functions (working memory, inhibition and planning), and their decoding skills, language skills (vocabulary and syntax knowledge) and reading comprehension, one year later. Results. Using structural equation modelling, the results indicated direct effects of working memory and planning on reading comprehension, as well as indirect effects of working memory and inhibition via decoding (v 2 = 2.46). Conclusions. The results of the present study highlight the importance of executive functions for reading comprehension after taking variance in decoding and language skills into account: Both working memory and planning uniquely contributed to reading comprehension. In addition, working memory and inhibition also supported decoding. As a practical implication, educational professionals should not only consider the decoding and language skills children bring into the classroom, but their executive functions as well. Becoming proficient in reading comprehension is an important goal of primary education. Reading comprehension, however, is a complex process, which requires several higher cognitive skills. As proposed by the 'Simple View of Reading' (Hoover & Gough, 1990) and consistently supported by other studies, reading comprehension is largely predicted by decoding and listening comprehension (i.e., the linguistic processes involved in the comprehension of oral language, which is commonly assessed with language skills such as This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

We examined the role child factors on the acquisition and transfer of learning the control of variables strategy (CVS) via instruction or self-discovery. Seventy-six fourth graders and 43 sixth graders were randomly assigned to a group receiving direct CVS instruction or a discovery learning group. Prior to the intervention, cognitive, scientific, and linguistic child factors were assessed. Acquisition and transfer of CVS knowledge were measured before and after intervention. Outcomes showed that CVS acquisition and transfer learning gains were higher for the instruction group than for the discovery group. Variation in CVS acquisition learning gains was explained by CVS pretest, verbal reasoning skills, and reading comprehension in the discovery group only. Variation in transfer gains were explained by vocabulary in the instruction group and by CVS prestest, verbal reasoning, vocabulary, and reading comprehension in the discovery group. It can be concluded that instruction provides a more effective method for learning CVS since individual differences in the instruction group played a marginal role explaining CVS posttest. However, since individual differences in linguistic ability account for variation in CVS learning gains discovery learning, these should be taken into consideration when teaching CVS in a more discovery-based manner.