Does Theory of Mind in Pre-kindergarten Predict the Ability to Think About a Reader’s Mind in Elementary School Compositions? A Longitudinal Study
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A critical skill in emergent writing is the developing ability to take the perspective of different readers; however, the precursors of this skill have not yet been identified. In this longitudinal study, 105 children (90 after attrition) were tested at 3 time points: pre-kindergarten (3–4 years old, n = 105), kindergarten (5 years old, n = 97), and Grade 1 (6–7 years old, n = 90). Theory of mind (ToM) in pre-kindergarten significantly predicted children’s awareness of a reader’s epistemic state when they dictated letters in both kindergarten and Grade 1 even after controlling for language (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Task [PPVT]) and inhibitory control. In addition, ToM in pre-kindergarten remained a significant predictor of reader awareness in Grade 1 after further controlling for reader awareness in kindergarten. There was little relationship between higher-order ToM tasks in kindergarten and reader awareness, but higher-order ToM in Grade 1 concurrently predicted reader awareness. Receptive vocabulary (PPVT) was significantly related to reader awareness at all time points, longitudinally and concurrently. This study has both theoretical implications for the relationship between ToM and emergent literacy and practical implications for the early identification and remediation of children at risk for later writing difficulties.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it