BACKGROUND It is important for parents and teachers to understand preschooler's early mathematics skills to best provide appropriate mathematics support. Comparing parents' and teachers' accuracy in reporting children's mathematics skills may help to ensure developmentally appropriate early math support in home and classroom environments. AIM The present study examined the accuracy of parents' and teachers' reports of preschoolers' early mathematics skills (i.e., counting, numeral identification, and quantitative and spatial word knowledge). SAMPLE Participants included 117 children 3 to 5 years old (M = 4.27, SD = .63, 49.6 % female) and their parent and Head Start teacher. METHOD Parents and teachers completed surveys reporting on each child's understanding of mathematics concepts via items from different mathematics measures. Children were directly assessed on their mathematics skills via the same or similar items. RESULTS Generally, parents' and teachers' reports were positively associated with direct assessments of children's mathematics skills. Parents' and teachers' reports of children's mathematical skills ranged from 47 % to 75 % accurate, and parents were more accurate than teachers in reporting children's quantitative word knowledge. The direction of inaccuracies (over-or underestimation) varied by mathematics skill type, such that caregivers tended to overestimate children's numeracy skills and underestimate their mathematical language knowledge. CONCLUSION Future research is needed to examine how the accuracy of parents and teachers reports influences early mathematics development, and how potentially improving caregiver accuracy might support children's mathematics learning.
The ability to express and understand emotion is fundamental to social communication, and develops through early parent-child interactions. Across two studies, we examined parents' and children's recognition of emotional expressions during a structured interactive task. In Study 1, parent-child dyads (N = 33, children aged 4-9 years) took turns producing facial expressions in response to emotion-eliciting objects while their partner guessed the eliciting object. Videos of children were shown to naïve adult raters (N = 88) completing the same task. Study 1 provided initial evidence for a familiarity effect, with parents outperforming naïve raters at recognising their child's expressions. Study 2 (N = 45 dyads, children aged 4-12 years) extended this by testing whether recognition accuracy reflects familiarity with a specific partner or general parenting experience. Participants completed the task with each other and with videos of unfamiliar partners. Naïve parents (N = 69) and non-parents (N = 68) also rated the children's expressions. Study 2 confirmed a bidirectional familiarity advantage: both parents and children were more accurate with their familiar partner than with unfamiliar individuals, suggesting the effect is specific to the parent-child relationship rather than reflecting a general ability to read adult or child faces. Recognition accuracy was not strongly predicted by age, suggesting familiarity may account for more variance in performance than developmental changes in expressive clarity alone. These findings support the view that the unique parent-child bond plays a meaningful role in emotional understanding.
Mindfulness-based interventions have shown promise in supporting psychological well-being in children. However, mindfulness is commonly measured using self-report questionnaires, a method that might be problematic due to its reliance on children’s accurate self-perceptions of their own mindfulness and the potential influence of social desirability bias. In the current study, we examined the convergent validity, the predictive validity, and the influence of social desirability bias on three mindfulness self-report measures for children ages 9–13 years (N = 109). Results showed that children’s self-reported mindfulness demonstrated good convergent validity and predictive validity, as higher levels of self-reported mindfulness were positively associated with higher levels of parent-reported executive functioning. Self-reported mindfulness also covaried with social desirability bias. However, controlling for this bias did not substantively affect the convergent validity nor the predictive validity of self-reported mindfulness. These findings suggest that children’s self-reported mindfulness also captures social desirability bias, but this bias may not affect conclusions about mindfulness when assessed as a latent factor across multiple measures. Future work measuring children’s mindfulness with self-reports should account for social desirability bias when possible, as well as explore objective methods of assessing mindfulness in children.
Theories of cognitive development propose that cultural values shape metacognitive skills. However, cross-cultural research on metacognition remains limited and often relies on verbal assessments that may lack validity across cultural contexts. The present study examined metacognitive monitoring in Kenyan, Chinese, and U.S. children (N = 95; 6–10-year-olds; 46% female) using a non-verbal problem-solving task in which children assembled objects according to a model. Across all three cultural contexts, children exhibited various monitoring behaviors (e.g., checking the model), and the frequency of these behaviors increased with age. Cross-cultural differences emerged in the specific monitoring strategies children used: Chinese children engaged in more thorough monitoring than Kenyan and U.S. children. These findings highlight both culturally-recurrent and culturally-variable patterns in children’s metacognitive monitoring.
Children learn novel verb meanings by integrating sentence-level cues with information from the surrounding event. Although sentence frames provide information about verb transitivity, success with intransitive frames varies across languages and tasks. In Mandarin, preschoolers have been reported to struggle with conjoined-subject intransitive sentences, raising the question of whether this difficulty reflects a limitation in syntactic bootstrapping or partly stems from how children construe the comparison scenes. In a forced-choice pointing task, Mandarin-speaking 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds heard transitive or conjoined-subject intransitive sentences containing novel verbs and chose between a causal scene and a noncausal scene. Critically, the noncausal scene was either a parallel-action scene or a joint-action scene. In the joint-action scene, the two participants acted together in physical contact but without a causal asymmetry. Children at all ages reliably matched transitive sentences to causal scenes. For intransitives, 3-year-olds performed at chance in both scene conditions, 4-year-olds succeeded only with joint-action scenes, and 5-year-olds succeeded in both. Thus, performance with intransitives improved with age and was facilitated when the noncausal alternative was easier to construe as a single noncausal event. These findings suggest that previously reported failures with Mandarin conjoined-subject intransitives cannot be attributed solely to insensitivity to argument structure, but also depend on how candidate events are visually and conceptually represented. More broadly, the results are consistent with a multiple-factor view of verb learning, in which syntactic cues interact with semantic, and event-based information.
