Which Early Childhood Experiences and Skills Predict Kindergarten Working Memory?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: We examined how empirically and theoretically important predictors help explain the development of kindergarten working memory, an understudied predictor of school readiness and adjustment to schooling in early childhood. Our specific aim was to examine the extent to which antecedents, opportunity, and propensity variables directly and indirectly predict working memory development. METHODS: We conducted structural equation modeling on a nationally representative and longitudinal sample of 14,000 kindergarten students. Predictors of end-of-kindergarten working memory include parent reports of antecedent variables such as socioeconomic status, mother's marital status, breastfeeding, child's age, and perception of child learning skills; teacher reports of opportunity variables including the frequency children read aloud and counted in their kindergarten class and classroom climate; and direct assessments of child propensity variables including earlier working memory, cognitive fluidity, teacher reports of child self-regulation, and math and reading knowledge. RESULTS: Together, childhood antecedents, opportunity, and propensity latent factors contributed to 41% of the variance of kindergarten working memory. Child propensity had a significant direct effect on child working memory, whereas antecedent and opportunity factors had significant indirect effects on working memory through child propensity. CONCLUSION: In this study, we identify several modifiable variables that directly and indirectly predict child working memory skills using a large population-based sample. Better understanding of how child-, family-, and school-level variables contribute to the development of working memory in young children can be seen as an important step in the creation of preventive interventions designed to improve these important skills.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".