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Young children, who are exposed to Latin script letters, experience difficulties in distinguishing between the reversible letters b and d and may therefore transform b into d (and vice versa). When children begin to write, in cultures with left-to-right writing/reading systems, they also often turn Arabic digits in the direction of writing/reading, thus, for example, producing e instead of 3. However, two different terms or processes, namely, confusion and reversal, are used in the literature to label these apparent transformations. This study aimed to provide empirical evidence that the two processes are indeed very different. The sample consisted of 529 first graders (M[subscript age] = 6.21 years) who participated in the French National Assessment at the beginning of the school year. Simple linear, Bayesian, and logistic regression modeling of the left-right reversal rate in writing digits as a function of the confusion rate in children's recognition of the letters b and d showed a negative relationship between the two rates, and a nonparametric test yielded a significant negative correlation (r[subscript S](318) = -0.373, p < 0.001). These results seem to rule out the possibility that the same process leads to reversing characters (letters or digits) in writing and misrecognizing b as d (or vice versa). This is the first study reporting strong empirical evidence that the processes of reversal and confusion are very different. Consequently, it would be a mistake to treat confusion between b and d as the reversal of b into d (and vice versa).

A live video was used to study the development of visual self-recognition in a cross-sectional sample of 152 typically developing French children aged between 15 months to 6 years. Three reactions to a mark placed on the child's cheek without their knowledge were studied: the touch of the mark with their hand, the ocular responsiveness to the mark they discovered on through the screen and, finally, their behavior when the experimenter silently unostentatiously proffered them a tissue. It was mainly shown that (1) the behavior of touching the mark increases until age 3 years, and then declines gradually, (2) from the age of 3, all children spot the mark within the first four seconds, and (3) the behavior of making use of the tissue to wipe the mark increases continuously, particularly from age 3. The latter behavior reveals a superior level of self-awareness: the emergence of a meta-consciousness of oneself.

Reversing characters (digits and letters) when writing, and complete mirror writing, raise one of the oldest and most mysterious questions in developmental and educational psychology: Why do five-year-old children write symbols (e.g., [reversed E] for E) they have neither learnt nor seen? Attempts to draw up a complete explanatory theory of character reversal in writings by typically developing children were long hindered by the existence of a seemingly satisfactory explanation (left-hand writing), the failure to bring together research in neuropsychology and educational psychology, and the failure to consider the shape and structure of the characters. The present paper remedies this situation by describing a new, comprehensive theory based on recent neuropsychological findings and extensive empirical observations. The theory assumes that a character's orientation, detected in the early visual processing area, is deleted (or made inaccessible) by the mirror generalization process during transfer to memory. Consequently, there is a period, usually around age five, during which children have representations of the characters' shapes but not their orientations. Hence, when asked to write a character, children have to improvise its orientation, and the orientation they choose (implicitly, non-consciously) is often derived from the writing direction in their culture.

Background: The development of early literacy skills in preschoolers is an important predictor of future academic performance. Four main domains of early literacy are currently observed: letter knowledge, vocabulary, phonological awareness and oral comprehension. A multiplicity of tasks or tests measures these domains in English language. However, there are currently no French-language tools for evaluating and monitoring the early literacy abilities of young children in francophone contexts. Methods: This paper addresses this lack by presenting a new French-language scale -- the Echelle Préscolaire de Littératie Emergente (EPLE) -- for assessing the early literacy skills of preschoolers. In addition to examining the EPLE's psychometric properties, we used path analysis to determine possible links between different dimensions of early literacy and children's characteristics (sex, age and socioeconomic status). Results: This study involves 167 French preschoolers (mean = 5.17 years, standard deviation = 0.59) attending kindergarten. All the participants were tested individually, and a specific entry in the tasks was proposed depending on the age of the children. First, the EPLE had good psychometric properties. Then, factor analysis of the data collected revealed a similar hierarchical factor structure as found in the literature. In addition, we found links between the four dimensions of early literacy measured by the EPLE and both children's age and socioeconomic status. Conclusion: The EPLE creates several new opportunities for early literacy research in French-speaking contexts. First, this tool reduces the gap in the field of testing young children skills. Then, it allows the comparison with worldwide researches. Moreover, this tool proposes pedagogical implications. In the next few years, the EPLE will be used by teachers or school psychologists to test the early competences of French children.

Background: Young children's mathematics abilities may be divided between symbolic and non-symbolic skills. Lower performance of SES disadvantaged versus advantaged children has already been established in symbolic math. Aim: This study aimed to verify the effect of children's SES category on non-symbolic mathematical (numerical) performance. Sample: The main sample comprises 4,955 children from the French longitudinal study, ELFE, tested when they were in the nursery school (4- to 5-year-olds). Method: The distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic math skills based on the specific math assessment items used in the present study was verified on a larger sample. The SES-related difference in non-symbolic math skills was then examined in the ELFE sample only. Results: The children's performance in non-symbolic maths is significantly and almost as strongly correlated with their family's income and their mother's level of education as their performances in symbolic maths. Linear regression mixed-effects modelling shows that the score in non-symbolic maths (out of 100) of children from families with below median income is 3.8 points lower than that of their peers from families with above median income. Conclusion: Children from disadvantaged SES backgrounds perform significantly lower than those from advantaged backgrounds in non-symbolic maths. Even if non-symbolic math skills retain an educational interest, they should not reduce the importance of symbolic math skills in young children.

The French National Cohort of Children Study ("Etude Longitudinale Française depuis l'Enfance"--ELFE) tested the literacy and numeracy skills of 4- to 5-year-old typically developing children in the second year of "école maternelle." Tasks were administered by more than 4,000 teachers at schools across France. One of the study's numeracy tasks required participants to write the number of ducks (up to 5) they had counted. Analyzing the digits written by 14,904 children showed that miswritings were much more common for the digit 3 than for the digit 4. This result is consistent with the right-orienting rule, which young children in Western cultures apply when they do not know a digit's orientation, and which leads them to write, for example, [backwards "3"] instead of 3. The nature and frequency of miswritten digits did not differ significantly between the 466 children presumed to have written with their left hand and the 3,531 children presumed to have written with their right hand. However, a logistic mixed-effects regression showed that two other factors--age of entry to "école maternelle" and very early smartphone use--had a (modest) influence on the percentage of digits that were miswritten.

This paper describes a French research project to co-design an early literacy/early numeracy tablet app for kindergarten students. In order to create an app that takes into account classroom/teaching constraints and the results of recent research, we adopted a theoretical co-design framework and followed a methodology involving researchers, education professionals and software engineers. We describe the design process and the app's educational content, together with the results of an initial trial of the app on a small sample of preschoolers, which showed that it is ready for larger scale testing. We conclude by discussing the specificities of our project and its contribution to the literature on the development of classroom apps for preschoolers.

The question of teaching a standard written algorithm for the four arithmetical operations in the first years of elementary school is increasingly raised as a consequence of the possibility of using calculators, tablets, and computers. This article first presents arguments both against and for maintaining this teaching in the first school years. Then, it presents an analysis of the procedure--whether it implies the standard algorithm or not--used by second grade students to solve a subtraction verbal problem. The 4720 students involved in the research were divided in a control group (n = 2101) and an experimental group (n = 2619) in which the standard written algorithm (SWA) was taught, or not taught, respectively. The effectiveness of algorithm use was analyzed not only in terms of accuracy of the answers, but also for its influence on the choice of the correct arithmetical operation and for its choice by the students as a function of their ability. The SWA was strongly associated with the use of the false arithmetical operation (effect size [phi] = 0.79)--addition instead of subtraction--but was chosen by students of all levels of ability. The latter result suggests that the SWA is well suited for the most advanced students but far less for the others who use it mechanically and without reflection.

Ensuring students correctly understand the notion of equality is a fundamental problem in teaching mathematics. Is it possible to teach arithmetic in such a way that students do not misinterpret the equal sign "=" as indicating the result of an arithmetic operation and, consequently, viewing the arithmetic operation symbols (+, -, or x) as systematically meaning perform a computation? The present paper describes the implementation of an experimental arithmetic teaching program (called ACE) drawn up in conjunction with teachers and focusing on these issues. We assessed the program's impact via an experiment involving 1140 experimental group students and 1155 control group students, and using a pretest/posttest design. The experimental group students achieved higher composite arithmetic scores, combining all four subdomains (arithmetic writing, mental computation, word-problem solving, and estimation), than control group students. The effect size, computed using individuals' posttest scores adjusted for pretest scores was d = 0.559. The ACE program was effective in all four subdomains tested; however, it was particularly successful in the arithmetic writing subdomain, especially in writing equalities. The program's effect not only held one year later, it was cumulative, as the benefits produced by following the program in both first and second grade were almost double those of following the program in just one grade.

We studied the effect of the number and characteristics of siblings (sex, age) on school achievement in several grades (kindergarten, first grade, and fifth grade), in two large French cohorts, with more than 16,000 children. Running linear mixed‐effects models, we find that, independently of socioeconomic status, having more siblings is negatively associated with school achievement. We found a stronger negative association between the number of siblings and the achievement in older compared to younger siblings. This finding is in line with the resource dilution model, where families with more children have fewer resources available per child, but contradicts the confluence model (i.e., a child's intellectual ability is influenced by the average intellectual ability in the family). The negative association between the number of siblings and achievement was moderated by family income, with weaker effects in wealthier families. This study emphasizes the negative association between the number of siblings and school achievement, independent of socioeconomic status. This effect is found for siblings of both genders, but is more negative for older siblings than younger ones. Interestingly, this association is less negative in wealthier families. This could be taken into account for public policies to ensure that all their children benefit from equal opportunities, and to design interventions to support larger families, especially from lower‐income backgrounds, to ensure that all children have access to the resources and support they need to succeed academically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has found that children reverse mainly the left-oriented characters when writing from memory (e.g. they write [iota] and [epsilon] instead of J and 3). In order to obtain an objective definition of the left-orientation of a character, the ratings of the level of left-orientation of all the asymmetrical capital letters and digits by 142 adult students was analysed in Study 1. Study 2, on 298 five-six-year-old children, examined an immediate prediction of Study 1, namely that the children reverse mainly the digits that the adult students have rated left-oriented. Other predictions, both of the posited representation of the writing during the reversal stage and the neurological process of mirror generalisation, were verified: the simplicity of the representation of the symmetrical digits 0 and 8 makes incorrect writings very rare; the mirror generalisation, which operates only in the left-right direction, makes other transformations (inversion or 180° rotation) very rare. Finally, the explanatory power of some putative individual factors of reversal (e.g. writing with the left hand) is shown to be far lower than that of the left-orientation of the characters.

Recent research has established that 5- to 6-year-old typically developing children in a left-right writing culture spontaneously reverse left-oriented characters (e.g., they write a [reversed J] instead of J) when they write single characters. Thus, children seem to implicitly apply a right-writing rule (RWR: see Fischer & Koch, 2016a). In Study 1, the reversal of all asymmetrical digits and capital letters by 356 children was modeled with a simple Rasch model, which describes reversal as the outcome of two competing responses, correct writing and writing in the cultural direction of writing. It accounts for the high frequency of reversals of the left-oriented characters (3, Z, J, 1, 2, 7, 9), as predicted by the RWR. Study 2 investigated letter reversals when children spontaneously write their name from right to left. Most of the 204 children in the study radically changed the direction of the RWR by reversing mainly the right-oriented letters (B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, N, P, R, S). Hence, a more universal formulation of the RWR would be as an implicit rule orienting characters in the writing direction. This reformulated rule is consistent with the "spatial agency bias" model (Suitner & Maas, 2016), according to which writing direction affects thoughts and actions. Visual and motoric statistical learning may favor bootstrapping of the rule. Taken together, these data demonstrate the prominent role of culture in a phenomenon--character reversal or mirror writing--which has often been presented uniquely as biologically determined.

Purpose: To assess the effect of age on the mean percentage of bleeding on probing (BOP) during supportive periodontal therapy (SPT) in patients enrolled in SPT for at least 5 years. Materials and Methods: This study was performed as a retrospective analysis of data collected from SPT patients initially diagnosed with gingivitis or mild to severe periodontitis. Two groups of patients were selected: in group A, younger adults (age = 35 years) were included while group B consisted of older SPT patients (age = 65 years). BOP in the two groups was compared according to both disease severity and % compliance with SPT visits. Results: BOP in all patients (n = 236) was 19.2% (± 12.4). Group A (n = 110) presented mean BOP levels of 19.7% (± 11.8), while lower BOP levels of 18.7% (± 13.0) were found in group B (n = 126; p = 0.5272). Older patients demonstrating high % compliance had lower mean BOP levels (14.2% ± 9.5) than younger patients (18.0% ± 11.7; p = 0.0841). Similarly, BOP was lower in older patients with moderate (group B: 18.4% ± 12.1, group A: 19.3% ± 14.6, p = 0.0541) or severe periodontitis (group B: 22.4% ± 11.4, group A: 23.2% ± 14.0; p = 0.3440). In patients with moderate or severe periodontitis and higher % compliance with SPT, the mean BOP was statistically significantly lower in older patients than in younger patients (moderate: 14.4% ± 11.9 vs 19.4% ± 15.1, p < 0.0001; severe: 13.2% ± 11.1 vs 18.3% ± 17.5, p = 0.0170). Conclusion: Older patients enrolled in SPT may present lower levels of BOP. This finding should be considered when determining SPT intervals with elderly patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a simple theory according to which the left-right reversal of single digits by 5- and 6-year-old children is mainly due to the application of an implicit right-writing or -orienting rule. A number of nontrivial predictions can be drawn from this theory. First, left-oriented digits (1, 2, 3, 7, and 9) will be reversed more frequently than the other asymmetrical digits (4, 5, and 6). Second, for some pairs of digits, the correct writing of the preceding digit will statistically predict the reversal of the current digit and vice versa. Third, writing hand will have little effect on the frequency of reversals, and the relative frequencies with which children reverse the asymmetrical digits will be similar regardless of children's preferred writing hand. Fourth, children who reverse the left-oriented digits the most are also those who reverse the other asymmetrical digits the least. An empirical study involving 367 5- and 6-year-olds confirmed these predictions. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

To date, few studies have investigated the evolution of problem solving and general numeracy abilities during adulthood: skills that have obvious social importance. In this research, evolutions in adults' mental arithmetic skills were investigated using data from the IVQ 2004 French national survey, which tested 9,185 adults aged between 18 and 65. Whereas some of our results confirm previous work, others are more surprising. For example, participants with higher levels of education achieved higher scores than did participants with lower levels of education, and this was true at all ages; however, improvements with age in performance only were found for participants with low levels of education (first grade or lower). For higher levels of education, performances were stable. Our results suggest that lifespan mental arithmetic, a domain not affected by the Flynn effect, relies mainly on pragmatic cognition, and develops as a result of everyday activities, as well as through initial instruction. (Contains 2 tables and 7 figures.)

This study contributes to the debate about the Flynn effect by proposing a long-term comparison (1921-2001) of the numerical knowledge of two cohorts of three- to five-and-a-half year-old children. In 1921, Beckmann (1923) assessed the numerical development of children using four tasks (Production, Distinction, Recognition, and Naming). In 2001, we used these same tasks to test 400 children equally divided into five age groups spaced six months apart. The main results are as follows: (1) the order of difficulty of the four tasks was the same in 2001 and 1921; (2) the 2001 cohort significantly outperformed the 1921 cohort with an advance in numerical development ranging from six months to one year, depending on the task; (3) the superiority of the 2001 children showed up by the age of 3; (4) the magnitude of the rise in scores varied across tasks (the greatest gain was found for the Naming task); and (5) the children in the two cohorts used the same number-evaluation strategies, but the 2001 children used more mature strategies on the Naming task than did same-age 1921 children, particularly subitizing for apprehending small numbers. The rise in scores seems to correspond to a genuine gain in numerical ability, apparently promoted by parental child-raising practices (cross-generational transmission). (Contains 2 figures, 8 tables, and 6 notes.)