Child care in The Netherlands: trends in quality over the years 1995-2005.

The authors assessed the quality of child care in a representative national sample of 42 child-care centers in the Netherlands and compared it with the quality of care that researchers have found using similar samples in 1995 (M. H. van IJzendoorn, L.

Aptitude-treatment interactions revisited: effect of metacognitive intervention on subtypes of written expression in elementary school students.

We examined the effectiveness of a metacognitive intervention for written language performance, based on the Hayes model of written expression, for 73 fourth-grade (n = 38) and fifth-grade (n = 35) students. The intervention consisted of twenty 45-min writing lessons designed to improve their awareness of writing as a problem-solving process. Each of the lessons addressed some aspect of planning, translating, and reflecting on written products; their self-regulation of these processes; and actual writing practice.

Subtypes of written expression in elementary school children: a linguistic-based model.

The purpose of this study was to provide a reliable and valid classification scheme for written expression that captured the linguistic variability present in a typical elementary school sample. This empirically derived classification model was based on the following linguistic-based writing skills: (a) understandability of discourse, (b) grammar, (c) semantics, (d) spelling, and (e) reading comprehension. The sample included 257 fourth-grade (n = 142) and fifth-grade (n = 115) students (46.

Executive functions in elementary school children with and without problems in written expression.

This study examined the executive functioning of 55 elementary school children with and without problems in written expression. Two groups reflecting children with and without significant writing problems were defined by an average primary trait rating across two separate narratives. The groups did not differ in terms of chronological age, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, special education status, or presence of attention problems or receptive vocabulary capabilities; however, they did differ in reading decoding ability, and this variable was controlled for in all analyses.