Marina Vasilyeva
Biographic Data
| ID | 4420543 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marina Vasilyeva |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marina |
| FAMILY NAME | Vasilyeva |
| SIGNATURE | VASILYEVA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2428-7694 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 135 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
How do parents initiate and sustain math-related conversations with preschoolers? Employing conversation analysis to examine parent–child math talk
Informal math interactions during childhood are related to children's math achievement; thus, there is rising interest in understanding the nature of these interactions. To date, most research on parent-child math talk has used quantitative indicators (e.g., word frequencies) to describe the input children receive. By contrast, the present study took a qualitative approach, using conversation analysis to investigate how parents initiate and susta…
Supporting African Refugee Children in an Afterschool Program: Facilitating Academic and Socio-Emotional Development
This study used participant observation methodology to identify learning goals and socio-emotional needs of school-aged African refugee children, and explored how an urban community-based afterschool program can support these students. Participants included 28 children, ranging from elementary to high-school students, who attended the afterschool program, African Community Education. The data consisted of ethnographic fieldnotes collected during …
Compensatory Relation Between Executive Function and Fluid Intelligence in Predicting Math Learning
Math learning is a key educational goal, and one marked by substantial individual differences even in the earliest grades. Although considerable research has examined the extent to which domain-general processes, such as executive functions and fluid intelligence, contribute to this variability, there is a notable gap in understanding how they may interact to predict early math learning. In particular, prior work had not examined potential modera…
Home math environment as a mediator of socioeconomic differences in early math skills: A study of Chinese families from disparate backgrounds
Children exhibit substantial variation in their early math skills, with pronounced achievement gaps by socioeconomic status (SES) observable even before formal schooling. These SES-related differences in math skills are long-standing and globally observed, prompting investigations into how SES variations in home math environment contribute to early math development. The present study employed a mixed-methods design to examine the relations among …
Recruiting spatial-numerical representations to increase arithmetic fluency in low-income students
This study examined the effects of training involving spatial versus nonspatial representations of numerical magnitude for promoting arithmetic fluency. The key goal was to advance theoretical understanding of the relation between spatial and math learning, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the development of future educational interventions. Toward this goal, the study tested the hypothesis that the use of spatial representations du…
Navigating Trade-Offs in Early Math: How Informational Priming Influences Parent–Child Interaction
Home math interventions often incorporate informational priming—explicit prompts emphasizing parental math input. While effective in increasing math talk, its impact on child outcome is mixed. This study examined how informational priming shapes the content and dynamic of math interactions. In year 2023, 122 Chinese parent–child dyads (MChildAge_Years = 5.25, 52% girls) participated in a business-as-usual play session, followed 2 weeks later by a…
Parental input as a mediating pathway for gender differences in early academic skills
Words matter: Effect of manipulating storybook texts on parent and child math talk
Cringe as an Ethical Kitsch and Practice of Distancing
The author addresses the problem of defining and analyzing the features of the cringe as a specific modern phenomenon. The first thesis of the article is that the word cringe being clearly similar to other slang words in terms of meaning and practice of use, is not their synonym and expresses its own new concept, important for the current cultural situation. The author demonstrates the features of this situation discussing the specificity of crin…
Vocabulary skills of bilingual children: The evidence for context‐dependent performance
Most bilingual children often display greater proficiency and preference for one of their two languages. Researchers refer to this asymmetry as language dominance. However, despite being possible to determine the overall language dominance in bilinguals, there may be substantial flexibility in their language use. In particular, the relative ease of using each language may depend on the sociolinguistic context and the language of the interlocutor …
Minor changes, big differences? Effects of manipulating play materials on parental math talk
Given the established role of parental talk in the growth of math knowledge in preschoolers, there has been an increasing focus on identifying ways to promote parental math talk at this stage of child development. The current study investigated how parental math talk is affected by features of play materials and contexts. The features were manipulated along two dimensions: homogeneity (whether the toys were unique or included identical sets) and …
Coronavirus rumors in China: Content, spread and control policy
Since the explosive outbreak of a novel coronavirus (now known as 2019-nCoV) in China’s Hubei province, a large quantity of information on epidemic prevention and control has been disseminate rapidly. The extensive spread of fake Internet news has an extremely negative psychological impact on individuals and society, and slows down the fight against the epidemic. The concern about proliferation of misleading information, rumors and myths has caus…
Leveraging measurement instruction to develop kindergartners’ numerical magnitude knowledge
Testing the family investment model in Russia: Estimating indirect effects of SES and parental beliefs on the literacy skills of first-graders
Operationalizing Levels of Academic Mastery Based on Vygotsky’s Theory: The Study of Mathematical Knowledge
The present study tested the possibility of operationalizing levels of knowledge acquisition based on Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive growth. An assessment tool (SAM-Math) was developed to capture a hypothesized hierarchical structure of mathematical knowledge consisting of procedural, conceptual, and functional levels. In Study 1, SAM-Math was administered to 4th-grade students ( N = 2,216). The results of Rasch analysis indicated that the test p…
Computational fluency and strategy choice predict individual and cross-national differences in complex arithmetic
The present study tested the hypothesis that children's fluency with basic number facts and knowledge of computational strategies, derived from early arithmetic experience, predicts their performance on complex arithmetic problems. First-grade students from United States and Taiwan (N = 152, mean age: 7.3 years) were presented with problems that differed in difficulty: single-, mixed-, and double-digit addition. Children's strategy use varied as …
Minding the gap: Children’s difficulty conceptualizing spatial intervals as linear measurement units
Understanding measurement units is critical to mathematics and science learning, but it is a topic that American students find difficult. In 3 studies, we investigated the challenges underlying this difficulty in kindergarten and second grade by comparing performance on different versions of a linear measurement task. Children measured crayons that were either aligned or shifted relative to the left edge of either a continuous ruler or a row of d…
An examination of stereotype threat effects on girls’ mathematics performance
Stereotype threat has been proposed as 1 potential explanation for the gender difference in standardized mathematics test performance among high-performing students. At present, it is not entirely clear how susceptibility to stereotype threat develops, as empirical evidence for stereotype threat effects across the school years is inconsistent. In a series of 3 studies, with a total sample of 931 students, we investigated stereotype threat effects…
Beyond syntactic priming: Evidence for activation of alternative syntactic structures
Priming methodology was previously used to investigate children's ability to represent abstract syntactic forms. Existing evidence indicates that following exposure to a particular syntactic structure (such as the passive voice), English-speaking children increase their production of that structure with new lexical items. In the present work, we utilize priming methodology to explore whether exposure to passive primes may increase children's prod…
Sources of variability in children’s language growth
Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children
Previous research has used cross-linguistic priming methodology with bilingual adults to explore the nature of their syntactic representations. The present paper extends the use of this methodology to bilingual children to investigate the relation between the syntactic structures of their two languages. Specifically, we examined whether the use of passives by the experimenter in one language primed the subsequent use of passives by the child in t…
Examination of the Psychometric Properties of the Measurement Skills Assessment
This article introduces the Measurement Skills Assessment (MeSA), which was designed to evaluate the mastery of measurement in elementary school students. The primary objectives for the MeSA include covering a broad range of measurement concepts, distinguishing between major subtypes of measurement, and constructing a continuum of items varying in complexity. This article investigates the psychometric properties of scores from this new test. A se…
The varieties of speech to young children
This article examines caregiver speech to young children. The authors obtained several measures of the speech used to children during early language development (14-30 months). For all measures, they found substantial variation across individuals and subgroups. Speech patterns vary with caregiver education, and the differences are maintained over time. While there are distinct levels of complexity for different caregivers, there is a common patte…
Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: Evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms
The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked t…
Preschool children's mathematical knowledge: "The effect of teacher "math talk
This study examined the relation between the amount of mathematical input in the speech of preschool or day-care teachers and the growth of children's conventional mathematical knowledge over the school year. Three main findings emerged. First, there were marked individual differences in children's conventional mathematical knowledge by 4 years of age that were associated with socioeconomic status. Second, there were dramatic differences in the a…
Preschool children's mathematical knowledge: "The effect of teacher "math talk
This study examined the relation between the amount of mathematical input in the speech of preschool or day-care teachers and the growth of children's conventional mathematical knowledge over the school year. Three main findings emerged. First, there were marked individual differences in children's conventional mathematical knowledge by 4 years of age that were associated with socioeconomic status. Second, there were dramatic differences in the a…
The varieties of speech to young children
This article examines caregiver speech to young children. The authors obtained several measures of the speech used to children during early language development (14-30 months). For all measures, they found substantial variation across individuals and subgroups. Speech patterns vary with caregiver education, and the differences are maintained over time. While there are distinct levels of complexity for different caregivers, there is a common patte…
Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers
Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice se…
Testing the family investment model in Russia: Estimating indirect effects of SES and parental beliefs on the literacy skills of first-graders
An examination of stereotype threat effects on girls’ mathematics performance
Stereotype threat has been proposed as 1 potential explanation for the gender difference in standardized mathematics test performance among high-performing students. At present, it is not entirely clear how susceptibility to stereotype threat develops, as empirical evidence for stereotype threat effects across the school years is inconsistent. In a series of 3 studies, with a total sample of 931 students, we investigated stereotype threat effects…
Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: Evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms
The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked t…
Minor changes, big differences? Effects of manipulating play materials on parental math talk
Given the established role of parental talk in the growth of math knowledge in preschoolers, there has been an increasing focus on identifying ways to promote parental math talk at this stage of child development. The current study investigated how parental math talk is affected by features of play materials and contexts. The features were manipulated along two dimensions: homogeneity (whether the toys were unique or included identical sets) and …
Minding the gap: Children’s difficulty conceptualizing spatial intervals as linear measurement units
Understanding measurement units is critical to mathematics and science learning, but it is a topic that American students find difficult. In 3 studies, we investigated the challenges underlying this difficulty in kindergarten and second grade by comparing performance on different versions of a linear measurement task. Children measured crayons that were either aligned or shifted relative to the left edge of either a continuous ruler or a row of d…
Home math environment as a mediator of socioeconomic differences in early math skills: A study of Chinese families from disparate backgrounds
Children exhibit substantial variation in their early math skills, with pronounced achievement gaps by socioeconomic status (SES) observable even before formal schooling. These SES-related differences in math skills are long-standing and globally observed, prompting investigations into how SES variations in home math environment contribute to early math development. The present study employed a mixed-methods design to examine the relations among …
Early Development of Scaling Ability
The map is a small-scaled version of the space it represents. It has been argued that children have difficulty interpreting maps because they do not understand scale relations. Recent research has shown that even preschoolers can solve problems that involve scaling in one dimension. This study examined whether early scaling ability extends to tasks involving two-dimensional maps and referent spaces of different sizes. Results showed that about 60…
Words matter: Effect of manipulating storybook texts on parent and child math talk
Computational fluency and strategy choice predict individual and cross-national differences in complex arithmetic
The present study tested the hypothesis that children's fluency with basic number facts and knowledge of computational strategies, derived from early arithmetic experience, predicts their performance on complex arithmetic problems. First-grade students from United States and Taiwan (N = 152, mean age: 7.3 years) were presented with problems that differed in difficulty: single-, mixed-, and double-digit addition. Children's strategy use varied as …
Language input and child syntax
Syntactic priming in young children
Early Development of Scaling Ability
The map is a small-scaled version of the space it represents. It has been argued that children have difficulty interpreting maps because they do not understand scale relations. Recent research has shown that even preschoolers can solve problems that involve scaling in one dimension. This study examined whether early scaling ability extends to tasks involving two-dimensional maps and referent spaces of different sizes. Results showed that about 60…
Preschool children's mathematical knowledge: "The effect of teacher "math talk
This study examined the relation between the amount of mathematical input in the speech of preschool or day-care teachers and the growth of children's conventional mathematical knowledge over the school year. Three main findings emerged. First, there were marked individual differences in children's conventional mathematical knowledge by 4 years of age that were associated with socioeconomic status. Second, there were dramatic differences in the a…
Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers
Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice se…
The varieties of speech to young children
This article examines caregiver speech to young children. The authors obtained several measures of the speech used to children during early language development (14-30 months). For all measures, they found substantial variation across individuals and subgroups. Speech patterns vary with caregiver education, and the differences are maintained over time. While there are distinct levels of complexity for different caregivers, there is a common patte…
Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: Evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms
The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked t…
Examination of the Psychometric Properties of the Measurement Skills Assessment
This article introduces the Measurement Skills Assessment (MeSA), which was designed to evaluate the mastery of measurement in elementary school students. The primary objectives for the MeSA include covering a broad range of measurement concepts, distinguishing between major subtypes of measurement, and constructing a continuum of items varying in complexity. This article investigates the psychometric properties of scores from this new test. A se…
Sources of variability in children’s language growth
Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children
Previous research has used cross-linguistic priming methodology with bilingual adults to explore the nature of their syntactic representations. The present paper extends the use of this methodology to bilingual children to investigate the relation between the syntactic structures of their two languages. Specifically, we examined whether the use of passives by the experimenter in one language primed the subsequent use of passives by the child in t…
Beyond syntactic priming: Evidence for activation of alternative syntactic structures
Priming methodology was previously used to investigate children's ability to represent abstract syntactic forms. Existing evidence indicates that following exposure to a particular syntactic structure (such as the passive voice), English-speaking children increase their production of that structure with new lexical items. In the present work, we utilize priming methodology to explore whether exposure to passive primes may increase children's prod…
An examination of stereotype threat effects on girls’ mathematics performance
Stereotype threat has been proposed as 1 potential explanation for the gender difference in standardized mathematics test performance among high-performing students. At present, it is not entirely clear how susceptibility to stereotype threat develops, as empirical evidence for stereotype threat effects across the school years is inconsistent. In a series of 3 studies, with a total sample of 931 students, we investigated stereotype threat effects…
Operationalizing Levels of Academic Mastery Based on Vygotsky’s Theory: The Study of Mathematical Knowledge
The present study tested the possibility of operationalizing levels of knowledge acquisition based on Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive growth. An assessment tool (SAM-Math) was developed to capture a hypothesized hierarchical structure of mathematical knowledge consisting of procedural, conceptual, and functional levels. In Study 1, SAM-Math was administered to 4th-grade students ( N = 2,216). The results of Rasch analysis indicated that the test p…
Computational fluency and strategy choice predict individual and cross-national differences in complex arithmetic
The present study tested the hypothesis that children's fluency with basic number facts and knowledge of computational strategies, derived from early arithmetic experience, predicts their performance on complex arithmetic problems. First-grade students from United States and Taiwan (N = 152, mean age: 7.3 years) were presented with problems that differed in difficulty: single-, mixed-, and double-digit addition. Children's strategy use varied as …
Minding the gap: Children’s difficulty conceptualizing spatial intervals as linear measurement units
Understanding measurement units is critical to mathematics and science learning, but it is a topic that American students find difficult. In 3 studies, we investigated the challenges underlying this difficulty in kindergarten and second grade by comparing performance on different versions of a linear measurement task. Children measured crayons that were either aligned or shifted relative to the left edge of either a continuous ruler or a row of d…
Testing the family investment model in Russia: Estimating indirect effects of SES and parental beliefs on the literacy skills of first-graders
Coronavirus rumors in China: Content, spread and control policy
Since the explosive outbreak of a novel coronavirus (now known as 2019-nCoV) in China’s Hubei province, a large quantity of information on epidemic prevention and control has been disseminate rapidly. The extensive spread of fake Internet news has an extremely negative psychological impact on individuals and society, and slows down the fight against the epidemic. The concern about proliferation of misleading information, rumors and myths has caus…
Leveraging measurement instruction to develop kindergartners’ numerical magnitude knowledge
Cringe as an Ethical Kitsch and Practice of Distancing
The author addresses the problem of defining and analyzing the features of the cringe as a specific modern phenomenon. The first thesis of the article is that the word cringe being clearly similar to other slang words in terms of meaning and practice of use, is not their synonym and expresses its own new concept, important for the current cultural situation. The author demonstrates the features of this situation discussing the specificity of crin…
Vocabulary skills of bilingual children: The evidence for context‐dependent performance
Most bilingual children often display greater proficiency and preference for one of their two languages. Researchers refer to this asymmetry as language dominance. However, despite being possible to determine the overall language dominance in bilinguals, there may be substantial flexibility in their language use. In particular, the relative ease of using each language may depend on the sociolinguistic context and the language of the interlocutor …
Minor changes, big differences? Effects of manipulating play materials on parental math talk
Given the established role of parental talk in the growth of math knowledge in preschoolers, there has been an increasing focus on identifying ways to promote parental math talk at this stage of child development. The current study investigated how parental math talk is affected by features of play materials and contexts. The features were manipulated along two dimensions: homogeneity (whether the toys were unique or included identical sets) and …
Words matter: Effect of manipulating storybook texts on parent and child math talk
Compensatory Relation Between Executive Function and Fluid Intelligence in Predicting Math Learning
Math learning is a key educational goal, and one marked by substantial individual differences even in the earliest grades. Although considerable research has examined the extent to which domain-general processes, such as executive functions and fluid intelligence, contribute to this variability, there is a notable gap in understanding how they may interact to predict early math learning. In particular, prior work had not examined potential modera…
Home math environment as a mediator of socioeconomic differences in early math skills: A study of Chinese families from disparate backgrounds
Children exhibit substantial variation in their early math skills, with pronounced achievement gaps by socioeconomic status (SES) observable even before formal schooling. These SES-related differences in math skills are long-standing and globally observed, prompting investigations into how SES variations in home math environment contribute to early math development. The present study employed a mixed-methods design to examine the relations among …
Recruiting spatial-numerical representations to increase arithmetic fluency in low-income students
This study examined the effects of training involving spatial versus nonspatial representations of numerical magnitude for promoting arithmetic fluency. The key goal was to advance theoretical understanding of the relation between spatial and math learning, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the development of future educational interventions. Toward this goal, the study tested the hypothesis that the use of spatial representations du…
Psychology (26 works) · Developmental psychology (19 works) · Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills (13 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (11 works) · Mathematics (10 works) · Language Development and Disorders (9 works) · Cognitive psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Linguistics (8 works) · Mathematics education (8 works)