Reed Holden (cabledesert77)

Much research has examined the reciprocal relations between a child's spontaneous focus on number (SFON) in the preschool years and later mathematical achievement. However, this literature relies on several different tasks to assess SFON with distinct task demands, making it unclear to what extent these tasks measure the same underlying construct. Moreover, prior studies have investigated SFON in the context of small sets exclusively, but no work has explored whether children demonstrate SFON for large sets and how this relates to children's math ability. In the current study, preschoolers were presented four distinct SFON tasks assessing their spontaneous attention to number for small (Experiment 1) and large (Experiment 2) sets of numbers. Results revealed performance across the four distinct SFON tasks was unrelated. Moreover, preschooler's SFON for small sets (1-4 items) was significantly stronger than that for large sets (10-40 items), and analyses revealed that number knowledge was only associated with SFON for small sets and not large. Together, findings suggest that SFON may not be a set-size-independent construct and instead may hinge upon a child's number knowledge, at least in the preschool years. The role of number language and how it relates to children's SFON are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).In Study 1, 103 children ages 4 through 10 answered questions about their concept of and belief in luck, and completed a story task assessing their use of luck as an explanation for events. The interview captured a curvilinear trajectory of children's belief in luck from tentative belief at age 4 to full belief at age 6, weakening belief at age 8, and significant skepticism by age 10. The youngest children appeared to think of luck simply as a positive outcome; with age, children increasingly considered the unexpected nature of lucky outcomes and many came to view luck as synonymous with chance. On the story task, younger children attributed a stronger role to luck in explaining events than did older children. Studies 2 and 3 explored 2 potential sources of children's concepts. Study 2 explored adult use of the words luck and lucky, and found that most of this input consisted in using lucky to refer to positive outcomes, although the nature of use changed with the ages of the children. In Study 3, we examined children's storybooks about luck and found them to be rich potential sources of children's concepts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).Despite a growing understanding about civic development, we know little about whether the developmental course of civic engagement is the same across different types of civic engagement or different groups of youth. To advance developmental science in this area, we documented age-related change in community service, political interest, electoral participation, and political voice across the transition to adulthood by race/ethnicity, parent education, gender, and their interactions. National multicohort probability samples of U.S. high school seniors from the Monitoring the Future study were assessed at baseline (age 18) and followed longitudinally via self-administered mail surveys across 6 follow-up waves to age 29/30. Of the sample (N = 12,557), 51.0% were women, 11.0% were Black, 7.0% were Latinx, 2.3% were Asian, and 75.4% were White. Community service decreased from age 18 to 24, then showed modest recovery. Political interest, electoral participation, and political voice increased steadily from 18 to 24 and less steeply thereafter. Intercepts and (to some extent) slopes varied by race/ethnicity, parent education, gender, and intersections of these factors. Black youth started and remained highest in community service and showed more accelerated growth in political interest and electoral participation. Young women reported higher community service, whereas gender gaps in political engagement trajectories favored