Research on the development of academic skills: introduction to the special issue on early literacy and early numeracy.

Abstract

Welcome to the special issue on early literacy and early numeracy. We have a diverse collection of articles, elicited by asking researchers to submit short succinct manuscripts describing their recent research in one of these areas. The breadth of submissions received was surprising. The term early elicited manuscripts involving children as young as three and as old as ten, and the topics ranged from the relation between home literacy activities and reading acquisition to children's ability to estimate the sums of three-digit numbers. Despite the breadth of topics, however, there are several themes that tie these papers together. The first theme is that novice readers or calculators often use surprisingly sophisticated conceptual knowledge in their cognitive activities. In the present issue, Klein and Bisanz outline the role of early conceptual abilities in the addition performance of 4-year-olds. Senechal shows that 7-year-olds make use of morphological information to spell words. Bialystok and Codd explore the abilities of 3- to 7-year-olds in representing quantities. Lemaire, Lecacheur, and Farioli examine how 10-year-olds use sophisticated strategies to solve estimation problems. Across the seven papers in this issue, children showed an impressive variety of conceptual abilities, as well as some interesting limitations. A second theme that arises from several papers in this issue is the important role for experiential factors in cognitive development. Evans, Shaw, and Bell describe the relations between parent teaching activities and reading acquisition. Miller, Major, Shu, and Zhang show how language influences children's emerging numerical competencies. Such research suggests that closer attention to the wider community of learning that children experience will provide important insights into patterns of cognitive development. A third theme that arose serendipitously from our selection of researchers was that four of the seven papers in this special issue include or are based solely on the performance of children who speak a language other than English (i.e., Lemaire et al.; Miller et al.; Senechal; SprengerCharolles, Cole, Lacert, & Serniclaes). Research on cognitive development should be greatly enhanced by looking beyond an Anglo-centric perspective. A fourth theme of these papers, diversity in methodology, may represent somewhat of a departure from a typical collection of papers in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. The papers in this special issue represent a wide diversity of methods, running the gamut from correlational designs (Evans et al.) and reading-level and age-level matching designs (Sprenger-Charolles et al.) to methods that more closely resemble traditional experimental paradigms (e.g., Klein & Bisanz; Lemaire et al.; Senechal). We feel that all of these methods have a place in a broad understanding of cognitive development. Three- and four-year-olds are seldom amenable to the multi-trial, data-intensive approach that characterizes research on adult cognitive processes. Often, research on cognitive processes in children begins with observational studies, and progresses (slowly!) to focused experimental work. Children lead busy lives, and as researchers, we are limited in the amount of behaviour that we are able to extract from them. It should be clear from this set of papers that a diversity of methods does not mean a lowering of the standards for scientific research. Furthermore, each paper in this special issue presents a unique perspective, topic, or methodology, adding to the array of tools that can be accessed to advance research in this area. In the next two sections, I will briefly discuss how each of the papers contributes to the accumulation of knowledge in the areas of either early literacy or early numeracy. DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY LITERACY Three of the papers in this issue address questions in the area of early literacy (Evans et al. …