Abstract Although authorship is central to the career advancement of many ecologists, the processes used to assign authorship credit on papers are not always clear, ethical, or equitable. We developed the concept of authorship climate (perceptions of fairness related to procedures, communication practices, and outcomes of authorship decisions) and measured it using a survey of early‐career scientists from four fields across U.S. Ph.D.‐granting institutions. The results pointed to important differences in authorship climate perceptions across fields, career stages, and demographics. This paper provides an overview of the results, especially for the field of biology that encompasses ecology, and provides recommendations for improving authorship climate for ecologists.

Children who are more curious learn more in school, but little is known about how to promote curiosity-driven behaviors. In a preregistered experiment, 103 children (54 boys, 49 girls, ages 5-7 years) were randomly assigned to a condition in which they were encouraged to ask questions, or to listen carefully, during eight one-on-one science lessons over 2 weeks. Children in the question-asking condition valued new science information significantly more than children in the listening condition (Wilcoxon r = 0.23). Children with less background knowledge, as measured by their baseline vocabulary and science achievement, showed greater curiosity and learning benefits from question-asking. These results suggest that practice with question-asking can boost some aspects of curiosity and learning in science domains.

= 76) to play with a number-related board game, an active control board game, or a business-as-usual control group. Controlling for number knowledge, inhibitory control, and vocabulary at pretest, no differences in math skills at posttest were observed between the training groups. However, a significant interaction emerged between training group assignment and number knowledge, such that children with higher pretest number knowledge had higher posttest math scores when assigned to the number board game condition compared to the two control conditions, but no differences among conditions were seen for children with lower number knowledge. Collectively, these findings suggest that math activities may be most beneficial for math skills when children have stronger number knowledge and underscore the need for tailoring activities to children's current skill level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Young children vary widely in the extent to which they attend to numerical information in their everyday environments without explicit prompting. This tendency to spontaneously focus on numerosity has been linked to children's math skills in past work. However, various measures have been used to quantify children's spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) in previous studies, some of which rely on children's behavioral responses and others of which rely on verbal responses. Furthermore, these measures are not consistently related to one another or to children's math skills. In this study, we compared children's SFON as demonstrated through their behaviors and verbal responses during a set of imita-tion tasks in a sample of 107 3-and 4-year-olds. We found that children behaviorally demonstrate SFON (e.g., stamping the same number of spikes on a dinosaur as an experimenter) more fre-quently than they discuss number during the same tasks, but the two indices of SFON were significantly associated when accounting for variability in children's overall speech. Furthermore, we found that children's SFON through their actions was significantly pre-dicted by prior math skills, whereas SFON through speech was not.These findings indicate that SFON may be a multifaceted con-struct, although more work is needed to extend these findings to other common SFON tasks. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Using data from 12 studies, we meta-analyze correlations between parent number talk during interactions with their young children (mean sample age ranging from 22 to 79 months) and two aspects of family socioeconomics, parent education, and family income. Potential variations in correlation sizes as a function of study characteristics were explored. Statistically significant positive correlations were found between the amount of number talk in parent-child interactions and both parent education and family income (i.e., r = 0.12 for education and 0.14 for income). Exploratory moderator analyses provided some preliminary evidence that child age, as well as the average level of and variability in socioeconomic status, may moderate effect sizes. The implications of these findings are discussed with special attention to interpreting the practical importance of the effect sizes in light of family strengths and debate surrounding word gaps.

OBJECTIVES: The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) has been shown to be invariant across informants, developmental stage and settings, but tests of cross-cultural equivalence are limited to adolescents' self-reports. The COVID-19 pandemic makes this gap particularly pertinent, given the need to understand whether distinct government approaches (e.g., school closures) are uniquely associated with variability in children's psychosocial outcomes and the reliance on parents' ratings for young children. METHODS: Within a Confirmatory Factor Analysis framework, we tested the cross-cultural measurement invariance of the SDQ across six countries: Australia, China, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom and USA, using a sample of 1761 parents of 3- to 8-year-olds (M = 5.76, SD = 1.09). RESULTS: A five-factors model showed good fit to the data and partial cross-cultural scalar invariance. In this sample, Swedish parents reported the fewest peer problems (Cohen's d = 0.950) and the highest prosocial scores (Cohen's d = 0.547), whilst British parents reported the greatest child emotional (Cohen's d = 0.412) and hyperactivity problems (Cohen's d = 0.535). CONCLUSIONS: The present results indicate that the parent-version of the SDQ is appropriate for use and comparison across different contexts during the pandemic.

Objective To evaluate changes in electronic screen-based media use in 3- to 7-year-old children across 6 countries as a result of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Study design Between April and July 2020, parents of 2516 children completed online survey measures reporting current (“now”) and retrospective (“before the pandemic”) screen-based media use for the purposes of entertainment, educational app use, and socializing with family and friends. Parents also reported family socioeconomic characteristics and impacts of the pandemic to their physical wellbeing (eg, whether a family member or friend had been diagnosed with COVID-19) and social disruption (eg, whether family experienced a loss of income or employment due to the pandemic). Results On average, children engaged with screens more than 50 minutes more during the pandemic than before. This was largely driven by increases in screen use for entertainment purposes (nearly 40 minutes) and for use of educational apps (over 20 minutes). There was no overall change in screen use for socializing with family and friends. Children from lower socioeconomic status households increased screen use both for entertainment and educational app use more so than did children from higher socioeconomic status households. Conclusions The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has increased overall electronic screen-based media use. As lives become increasingly digital by necessity, further research is needed to better understand positive and negative consequences of electronic screen-based media use.

Variability in children's early math skills may stem from differences in experienced math learning opportunities at home. Previous studies have quantified math-learning opportunities at home through engagement with math-related activities or exposure to number talk during parent-child conversations, but little is known about how specific activities relate to talk about math. The current study aims to explore how math activities and number talk occur at home and understand how these associations may vary across different types of families. Number talk was quantified for 97 parent-child dyads during in-lab and in-home play sessions. Results show that time spent in math-related activities during home observations was related to parent reports of math activities as well as parent number talk at home and in the lab. Interestingly, during non-math-related activities, we found that parents with higher education levels and parents of boys used more number talk than parents with lower education levels and parents of girls. During math-related activities, however, no such educational or gender differences were seen in number talk. These results highlight the importance of considering the contextual influences and constraints that affect children's opportunities for learning math, especially when designing interventions to increase math learning in families' homes. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Young children have better math abilities when their parents engage in more math-related conversations with them. Yet, previous studies have found that math talk occurs only very infrequently in everyday interactions. In the present study, we sought to promote adult-child conversations about math in a naturalistic context using minimal instructions. We observed 179 adult-child dyads while they shopped in grocery stores with signs prompting them to engage in math-related conversations (math condition), signs prompting them to talk about other topics (general language condition), or without any signs (baseline condition). In the math condition, more adults talked about math compared to the general language or the baseline condition, and this finding could not be explained by demographic characteristics of the dyad or the overall amount of conversations. This study demonstrates that cost-effective signs placed in everyday contexts can promote math-related conversations and potentially provide math learning opportunities for children.

Recent public discussions have suggested that the under-representation of women in science and mathematics careers can be traced back to intrinsic differences in aptitude. However, true gender differences are difficult to assess because sociocultural influences enter at an early point in childhood. If these claims of intrinsic differences are true, then gender differences in quantitative and mathematical abilities should emerge early in human development. We examined cross-sectional gender differences in mathematical cognition from over 500 children aged 6 months to 8 years by compiling data from five published studies with unpublished data from longitudinal records. We targeted three key milestones of numerical development: numerosity perception, culturally trained counting, and formal and informal elementary mathematics concepts. In addition to testing for statistical differences between boys' and girls' mean performance and variability, we also tested for statistical equivalence between boys' and girls' performance. Across all stages of numerical development, analyses consistently revealed that boys and girls do not differ in early quantitative and mathematical ability. These findings indicate that boys and girls are equally equipped to reason about mathematics during early childhood. Education: No gender differences in children's mathematicsGirls and boys show no cognitive differences in mathematical ability during infancy and early childhood across multiple tasks. To compare boys' and girls' early mathematical thinking, Alyssa Kersey and colleagues at the University of Rochester and University of Pittsburgh examined performance on three milestones of numerical development: numerosity sensitivity, counting range, and early mathematics achievement. Researchers tested not only for statistical differences between boys and girls but also statistical similarities. Across all aspects of early mathematics development, boys and girls exhibited no statistical differences and instead generally showed statistical equivalence. The results suggest that girls and boys begin development with an equivalent cognitive capacity for mathematics.