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Creative orientation is the extent to which different individuals are drawn toward creative activities (e.g., art, music). We know relatively little about child-level creative orientation given certain testing limitations. Adult tools often measure time spent engaged in creative pursuits, but this method is unsuitable for children because their free time is often dictated by parents. To overcome this, we devised an entirely novel measure of creative orientation, the "Children's Creative Orientation Test: Artistic (C-COT: Artistic)." This short task, suitable for children as young as 6, elicits children's creative urges toward artistic pursuits independently of parental influence and provides quantitative scoring. We applied our measure to over 3000 children aged 6-10 years, where it showed robust reliability, suggesting that creative orientation is a stable trait over time. We show that creative orientation is also influenced by classroom cohort, age, and gender but is unaffected by socio-economic status or seasonal changes (autumn vs. spring testing). We showed too that creative orientation converges with creative thinking (divergent thinking), creative personality (openness to experiences, especially the aesthetics subtrait), and creative engagements in the home. We present our test here in full, as a simple, fast, and robust measure of creative artistic orientation in children.

This study examined how colored educational tools improve children's numerosity ("number sense") and/or mathematics. We tested children 6-10 years (n = 3,236) who had been exposed to colored numbers from the educational tools "Numicon" (Oxford University Press, 2018) or "Numberjacks" (Ellis, 2006), which map colors to magnitudes or Arabic numerals, respectively. In a free association task pairing numbers with colors, a subset of children spontaneously provided colors matching one of these schemas. These children, who had internalized "Numicon" (colored magnitude), showed significantly better numerosity but not mathematics compared to peers. There was no similar benefit from internalizing "Numberjacks" (colored numerals). These data support a model in which colored number tools provide benefits at different levels of numerical cognition, according to their different levels of cross-modal mappings.

In studies of child development, the combined effect of multiple risks acting in unison has been represented in a variety of ways. This investigation builds upon this preceding work and presents a new procedure for capturing the combined effect of multiple risks. A representative sample of 2,899 British children had their cognitive development measured at 36 and 58 months of age along with 10 potential risks during this period of development. Comparing a cumulative index of these risks against the previously undocumented alternative of confirmatory factor analysis using formative measurement, this study found differences favouring the factor analysis. The factor analysis procedure demonstrated greater predictive power of children's cognitive development while it systematically tested two of the assumptions implicit in cumulative risk indices.

Sensory sensitivities in children are found not only across a range of childhood disorders, but also within the general population. The current exploratory study examines the reliability and validity of a novel parent-report measure which assesses sensory-sensitivities in both typically developing and non-typically developing children. This 42-item Parent-completed Glasgow Sensory Questionnaire (GSQ-P) has been adapted by us from an existing adult tool (Glasgow Sensory Questionnaire), and measures children's hyper-sensitivities (sensory overload leading to avoidance-behaviours) and hypo-sensitivities (sensory dampening leading to seeking-behaviours) across seven different sense domains (visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, vestibular, proprioception). We validated this novel measure on the parents of 601 English children 6–11 years. Both the long version (42-items GSQ-P) and an additional reduced version (24-item rGSQ-P) significantly associated with children's anxiety, behavioural difficulties, and ability to empathise. As expected, sensory sensitivities were invariant across age and gender, but non-typically developing children had significantly elevated scores compared to typically developing peers (in both GSQ-P and rGSQ-P). We also provide insight into the structure of sensory sensitivities in children, showing for the first time that hyper sensitivities cluster by sense (e.g., tactile questions cluster together; visual questions cluster together) whilst hypo sensitivities cluster by behaviour (e.g., a cluster of seeking-behaviours irrespective of sense; a cluster of sensory dampening irrespective of sense). We offer both instruments (GSQ-P and rGSQ-P) as free reliable measures for better understanding children's sensitivities, for use in different circumstances depending on focus. Highlights: The paper explores two new parent-report sensory sensitivity questionnaires adapted from the adult Glasgow Sensory Questionnaire. Sensory sensitivity scores were invariant across age groups (6–10 years) and between girls and boys. Anxiety, internalising behaviours and poorer empathy were associated more closely with hyper-sensitivity, whereas externalising behaviours were associated more with hypo-sensitivity. Hyper-sensitivity items clustered together within sense modalities, whereas hypo-sensitivity items tendered to cluster by behavioural manifestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]