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1. Verbal counting and the timing of number acquisition in an indigenous Amazonian group

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270739  

   Boni, Isabelle; Jara-Ettinger, Julian; Sackstein, Sophie; Piantadosi, Steven T. (August 2022, PLOS ONE)

   Perlman, Marcus (Ed.)

   Children in industrialized cultures typically succeed on Give-N, a test of counting ability, by age 4. On the other hand, counting appears to be learned much later in the Tsimane’, an indigenous group in the Bolivian Amazon. This study tests three hypotheses for what may cause this difference in timing: (a) Tsimane’ children may be shy in providing behavioral responses to number tasks, (b) Tsimane’ children may not memorize the verbal list of number words early in acquisition, and/or (c) home environments may not support mathematical learning in the same way as in US samples, leading Tsimane’ children to primarily acquire mathematics through formalized schooling. Our results suggest that most of our subjects are not inhibited by shyness in responding to experimental tasks. We also find that Tsimane’ children (N = 100, ages 4-11) learn the verbal list later than US children, but even upon acquiring this list, still take time to pass Give-N tasks. We find that performance in counting varies across tasks and is related to formal schooling. These results highlight the importance of formal education, including instruction in the count list, in learning the meanings of the number words. 

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2. The Long-Term Distributional and Welfare Effects of Covid-19 School Closures

   https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac028  

   Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola; Krueger, Dirk; Ludwig, Alexander; Popova, Irina (April 2022, The Economic Journal)

   Abstract Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the heterogeneous impact of school closures during the corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. In the model, public investment through schooling is combined with parental time and resource investments in the production of child human capital at different stages in the children’s development process. We quantitatively characterise the long-term consequences from a COVID-19-induced loss of schooling, and find average losses in the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of the affected children of $$2.1\%$$, as well as welfare losses equivalent to about $$1.2\%$$ of permanent consumption. Because of self-productivity in the human capital production function, younger children are hurt more by the school closures than older children. The negative impact of the crisis on children’s welfare is especially severe for those with parents with low educational attainment and low assets. 

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3. Diverse mathematical knowledge among indigenous Amazonians

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215999120  

   O’Shaughnessy, David M.; Cruz Cordero, Tania; Mollica, Francis; Boni, Isabelle; Jara-Ettinger, Julian; Gibson, Edward; Piantadosi, Steven T. (August 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   We investigate number and arithmetic learning among a Bolivian indigenous people, the Tsimane’, for whom formal schooling is comparatively recent in history and variable in both extent and consistency. We first present a large-scale meta-analysis on child number development involving over 800 Tsimane’ children. The results emphasize the impact of formal schooling: Children are only found to be full counters when they have attended school, suggesting the importance of cultural support for early mathematics. We then test especially remote Tsimane’ communities and document the development of specialized arithmetical knowledge in the absence of direct formal education. Specifically, we describe individuals who succeed on arithmetic problems involving the number five—which has a distinct role in the local economy—even though they do not succeed on some lower numbers. Some of these participants can perform multiplication with fives at greater accuracy than addition by one. These results highlight the importance of cultural factors in early mathematics and suggest that psychological theories of number where quantities are derived from lower numbers via repeated addition (e.g., a successor function) are unlikely to explain the diversity of human mathematical ability. 

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4. corpus and behavioral analysis of the quality of young children’s STEM books.

   Miller, H.E. (January 2020, Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Promoting early STEM knowledge helps to prepare children for formal schooling. Shared book reading may promote early STEM knowledge. This research examined the quality of available STEM books in children’s environments and investigated how such books influenced children’s learning in shared book reading contexts. In Study 1, we used both meaning-based human coding and computerized latent semantic analysis to categorize books based on the extent to which they provided support for encoding and demand for active recall. We found similarity in the ratings using the two approaches. Most books fell into categories characterized by low Support and Demand. In Study 2, we found that 4- to 5-year-olds learned more STEM facts when books were high in Support and/or Demand, although few books fell into those categories. This research highlights the importance that textual features of books play in promoting early STEM knowledge during shared book reading. 

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5. Similarity in transgender and cisgender children’s gender development

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1909367116  

   Gülgöz, Selin; Glazier, Jessica J.; Enright, Elizabeth A.; Alonso, Daniel J.; Durwood, Lily J.; Fast, Anne A.; Lowe, Riley; Ji, Chonghui; Heer, Jeffrey; Martin, Carol Lynn; et al (November 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Gender is one of the central categories organizing children’s social world. Clear patterns of gender development have been well-documented among cisgender children (i.e., children who identify as a gender that is typically associated with their sex assigned at birth). We present a comprehensive study of gender development (e.g., gender identity and gender expression) in a cohort of 3- to 12-y-old transgender children (n = 317) who, in early childhood, are identifying and living as a gender different from their assigned sex. Four primary findings emerged. First, transgender children strongly identify as members of their current gender group and show gender-typed preferences and behaviors that are strongly associated with their current gender, not the gender typically associated with their sex assigned at birth. Second, transgender children’s gender identity (i.e., the gender they feel they are) and gender-typed preferences generally did not differ from 2 comparison groups: cisgender siblings (n = 189) and cisgender controls (n = 316). Third, transgender and cisgender children’s patterns of gender development showed coherence across measures. Finally, we observed minimal or no differences in gender identity or preferences as a function of how long transgender children had lived as their current gender. Our findings suggest that early sex assignment and parental rearing based on that sex assignment do not always define how a child identifies or expresses gender later. 

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