Psychological measures frequently show trait-like properties, and the ontological status of stable psychological traits has been discussed for decades. We argue that these properties can emerge from causal dynamics of time-varying processes, which are from the analysis model, potentially leading to the estimation of traits that are, at least in part, illusory. Theories positing the importance of a large set of dynamic psychological causes across development are consistent with the existence of illusory traits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren's early skills are strong predictors of later learning outcomes. Research aiming to disentangle the causal effects of early skills from unmeasured, stable characteristics related to learning throughout development demonstrates that unmeasured confounders explain a large portion of the effects of early skills previously identified. To date, such research has been conducted exclusively in high-income Western countries, where education systems are better funded and overall learning outcomes are much higher than in low- and middle-income countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearchers and policymakers aspire for educational interventions to change children's long-run developmental trajectories. However, intervention impacts on cognitive and achievement measures commonly fade over time. Less is known, although much is theorized, about social-emotional skill persistence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaking causal inferences regarding human behaviour is difficult given the complex interplay between countless contributors to behaviour, including factors in the external world and our internal states. We provide a non-technical conceptual overview of challenges and opportunities for causal inference on human behaviour. The challenges include our ambiguous causal language and thinking, statistical under- or over-control, effect heterogeneity, interference, timescales of effects and complex treatments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe home math environment has gained considerable attention as a potential cause of variation in children's math performance, and recent research has suggested positive associations between parents' math talk and children's mathematical performance. However, the extent to which associations reflect robust causal effects is difficult to test. In a preregistered meta-analysis, we assess the association between parents' math talk and children's math performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examines the effect of homicides around schools on the standardized test scores of fifth and ninth graders (N = 4729; M = 12.71 years, SD = 2.13) using a quasi-experimental design in two Colombian cities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe assessed the impacts of Fraction Ball-a novel suite of games combining the benefits of embodied guided play for math learning-on the math language production and behavior of students and teachers. In the Pilot Experiment, 69 fifth and sixth graders were randomly assigned to play four different Fraction Ball games or attend normal physical education class. The Efficacy Experiment was implemented to test improvements made through co-design with teachers with 160 fourth through sixth graders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is a norm in psychology to use causally ambiguous statistical language, rather than straightforward causal language, when describing methods and results of nonexperimental studies. However, causally ambiguous language may inhibit a critical examination of the study's causal assumptions and lead to a greater acceptance of policy recommendations that rely on causal interpretations of nonexperimental findings. In a preregistered experiment, 142 psychology faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students (54% female), ages 22-67 (M = 33.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWomen remain underrepresented in most math-intensive fields. [Breda and Napp, , 15435 (2019)] reported that girls' comparative advantage in reading over math (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite policy relevance, longer-term evaluations of educational interventions are relatively rare. A common approach to this problem has been to rely on longitudinal research to determine targets for intervention by looking at the correlation between children's early skills (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Physical punishment at home and in schools is widespread around the world. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have synthesized evidence, mostly from high-income countries (HICs), showing that physical punishment relates to multiple detrimental individual outcomes. Yet, less work has been done to synthesize the evidence on the association between physical punishment at home and schools and child, adolescent, and adult outcomes in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where more than 90% of children live and physical punishment is most socially normative and prevalent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlausible competing developmental models show similar or identical structural equation modeling model fit indices, despite making very different causal predictions. One way to help address this problem is incorporating outside information into selecting among models. This study attempted to select among developmental models of children's early mathematical skills by incorporating information about the extent to which models forecast the longitudinal pattern of causal impacts of early math interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDimensional comparisons (i.e., comparing own performances across domains) may drive an increasing differentiation in students' math and verbal self-concepts over time, but little longitudinal research has directly tested this assumption.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAttention to affect is theoretically a precursor to one's ideal affect (i.e., preference for feeling low- and high-arousal positive and negative affect) and emotion regulation (ER).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
November 2021
We performed a meta-analysis of approximate number system (ANS) training studies to investigate the strength of the causal effects of practicing ANS related tasks on symbolic math performance. Across 33 effect sizes from 11 studies involving 754 participants, for which neither the treatment nor control group received symbolic training, we found a small nonsignificant and sensitive effect of ANS training on symbolic math task performance ( = .11, 95% confidence interval, CI [-.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychol Sci Public Interest
October 2020
The sustaining environments hypothesis refers to the popular idea, stemming from theories in developmental, cognitive, and educational psychology, that the long-term success of early educational interventions is contingent on the quality of the subsequent learning environment. Several studies have investigated whether specific kindergarten classroom and other elementary school factors account for patterns of persistence and fadeout of early educational interventions. These analyses focus on the statistical interaction between an early educational intervention - usually whether the child attended preschool - and several measures of the quality of the subsequent educational environment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrior nonexperimental studies have been used to conclude that children's reading and mathematics achievement bidirectionally influence each other over time, with strong paths from (a) early reading to later mathematics and (b) early mathematics to later reading. In the most influential study on the topic, the early math-to-later-reading path was reported to be stronger than the early reading-to-later-math path (Duncan et al., 2007).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
February 2021
We performed a meta-analysis of dual-task experiments to assess the robustness of the effects of conducting working memory secondary tasks on arithmetic performance. Four hundred effect sizes from 21 studies from 1,049 participants were analyzed across a variety of specifications. Results revealed that increases in working memory load resulted in slower (7% to 19% reduction) speed of solving of arithmetic problems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite agreement about the importance of executive function (EF) for children's early math achievement, its treatment in correlational studies reflects a lack of agreement about the theoretical connection between the two. It remains unclear whether the association between EF and math operates through a latent EF construct or specific EF components. Specifying the correct measurement model has important theoretical implications for the predicted effects of EF interventions on children's math achievement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: There is mixed evidence about emotional processing abnormalities in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, with self-reports and clinician ratings indicating significant differences between patients and controls, but studies of in-the-moment, self-reported emotional experience finding only small differences between these groups. The current meta-analysis synthesizes statistics from studies measuring the P3 and LPP, two event-related potential (ERP) components sensitive to attentional allocation, to examine whether patients exhibit ERP response abnormalities to neutral and valenced visual stimuli.
Methods: Standardized mean amplitudes and standard errors of P3 and/or LPP waveforms (300-2000 ms) in response to neutral and valenced images were calculated for 13 studies (total n = 339 individuals with schizophrenia, 331 healthy controls).
Although many interventions have generated immediate positive effects on mathematics achievement, these effects often diminish over time, leading to the important question of what causes fadeout and persistence of intervention effects. This study investigates how children's forgetting contributes to fadeout and how transfer contributes to the persistence of effects of early childhood mathematics interventions. We also test whether having a sustaining classroom environment following an intervention helps mitigate forgetting and promotes new learning.
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