The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Italian primary school children's learning: A systematic review through a psycho-social lens.

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically affected many areas and contexts of today's society, including school and family. Several studies focused on the worldwide effects of school closures on students' learning outcomes, context, and well-being. However, the data emerging from these studies are often inconsistent and fragmentary, highlighting the need of a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon. This need is especially urgent for the countries with the most severe school closure, like Italy. This systematic review aims to collect the opinions of parents, teachers, and students on: other dimensions of Italian primary school students affected by school closures, beyond academic performance; hypothetical agreement between the opinions of parents, teachers, and students regarding the different effects of school closures on Italian primary school students; possible differences between the effects of school closures on Italian primary school students and the students in other countries. Our search was conducted using PRISMA 2020 guidelines on Web of Science, Pubmed, Scopus, and EBSCOHost. The results obtained from 34 articles revealed a strong concern on the part of all stakeholders involved in learning during the pandemic, with evident negative effects for Italian school students. The constraint on distance learning led to a drastic change in everyone's routine, and a negative emotional change on the part of young students. Parents and teachers generally considered distance learning to be ineffective for the education of their children and students; they encountered technical-practical difficulties in the use of electronic devices for participation in school activities; overall learning deficits on the part of students, especially in mathematics, as confirmed by INVALSI results were also found. The investigation reveals a condition of shared emotional and academic performance difficulty, and a further challenging circumstance for students previously at risk of marginalization. Further research in this field is paramount to identify new and adequate recovery strategies.

From the lab to the classroom: Improving children's prospective memory in a natural setting.

BACKGROUND: Laboratory-based studies have shown that children's ability to remember intentions (i.e., prospective memory; PM) can be improved by asking them to imagine performing the PM task beforehand (i.e., episodic future thinking; EFT) or to predict their PM performance. Moreover, combining the two strategies resulted in an additional improvement in children's PM performance. However, the effectiveness of these encoding strategies on real-life PM tasks is still unknown. AIMS: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of EFT instructions, performance predictions, and of their combination on children's PM in a natural setting, namely in the classroom. SAMPLE: Twelve classes composed by a total of 121 children (53% females) aged between seven and 9 years participated to the study. METHODS: As a PM task, children were asked by their teachers to deliver a letter to their parents and to bring it back to school the next day. Children were divided into four groups: control, prediction, EFT, and the EFT + prediction group. Parent reports on children's everyday prospective and retrospective memory failures were also collected. RESULTS: Results showed that encoding strategies were effective in enhancing children's PM performance. However, differences compared to previous laboratory-based findings emerged since predicting PM performance resulted to be most effective in enhancing real-life PM performance. Moreover, parent reports were related to children's PM performance. CONCLUSIONS: These novel findings highlight the importance of studying PM interventions in natural settings in order to increase their ecological validity and inform educational practices.

Emotions in Times of Pandemic Crisis among Italian Children: A Systematic Review.

Several studies underlined the negative effects of forced social isolation on emotional processes in younger population. The current study aimed to review existing evidence of the pandemic's impact on the emotional regulation of Italian children aged 0-12 years in order to identify personal and contextual factors that may adversely impact their developmental process. Different electronic databases (Web of Science, APA PsycInfo, APA PsycArticles, MEDLINE, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, and Scopus) were used to identify peer-reviewed studies published in English and Italian. Thirteen studies were included in the review, covering a total of 18.843 children. All studies reported negative effects of the lockdown on a child's emotional processes. The most affected were children aged 3-5 years, those living in Northern Italy, and those with low socioeconomic status (SES) families. Alterations in emotional processes were associated with sleep disturbances, quality of family relationships, personality structures, the coping strategies used, and time spent with technological devices. Finally, two- (time × parenting) and three-way (time × parenting × environmental sensitivity) interactions resulted significantly in predicting a child's emotional regulation, respectively, in terms of externalizing and internalizing behaviors. This review remarks that children's emotional processes were negatively impacted during social lockdown, especially where acute social isolation interacted with a set of dispositional and situational risk factors.

Literacy Acquisition Trajectories in Bilingual Language Minority Children and Monolingual Peers with Similar or Different SES: A Three-Year Longitudinal Study.

Bilingualism and socio-economic status (SES) differentially affect linguistic and cognitive development. However, less evidence has been collected regarding their impact on literacy trajectories. The present longitudinal study evaluated the literacy development of language minority bilingual children (LMBC) and monolingual peers with different SES. A group of LMBC with low-SES (n = 18) and monolingual peers with low (n = 18) or high (n = 14) SES were followed from 2nd to 5th grade through a set of tasks assessing decoding (words, nonwords, passage), reading, and listening comprehension, and spelling skills. The results showed that all groups achieved better performances over time in all measures, except listening comprehension. However, low-SES LMBC underperformed in spelling tasks compared to the monolingual groups. In reading comprehension, there was a time*group interaction that showed how low-SES LMBC reached similar performances of low-SES monolinguals in fifth grade, but both groups underperformed compared to the high SES monolingual group. The discussion is focused on the need for research and educational settings to consider the differential impact of bilingualism and SES. Bilingualism seems to be associated with a longer time in developing adequate spelling skills, whereas SES was the primary underpinning of the reading comprehension gap over time.

Effects of semantic relationship and preactivation on memory updating.

Semantic relationship modulates working memory (WM) processes by promoting recall but impairing recognition. Updating is a core mechanism of WM responsible for its stability and flexibility; it allows maintenance of relevant information while removing no-longer relevant one. To our knowledge, no studies specifically investigated how WM updating may benefit from the processing of semantically related material. In the current study, two experiments were run with this aim. In Experiment 1, we found an advantage for semantically related words (vs. unrelated) regardless of their association type (i.e., taxonomic or thematic). A second experiment was run boosting semantic association through preactivation. Findings replicated those of Experiment 1 suggesting that preactivation was effective and improved semantic superiority. In sum, we demonstrated that long-term semantic associations benefitted the updating process, or more generally, overall WM function. In addition, pre-activating semantic nodes of a given word appears likely a process supporting WM and updating; thus, this may be the mechanism favoring word process and memorization in a semantically related text.

Phonological memory updating and developmental dyslexia: The role of long-term knowledge.

The relationship between phonological knowledge and reading is consistent both in typically developing children and in children with dyslexia. However, children with dyslexia usually show lower phonological skills. In a group of children with dyslexia 8- to 12-year-old we investigated how different long-term memory phonological associations are updated in memory, that is how are kept in mind and replaced when no longer relevant. Response times (RTs) and accuracy rates were collected. Typically, long-term memory associations are dismantled and updated with greater difficulty (longer RTs). We did not replicate these findings in children with dyslexia thus demonstrating the effects of phonological disruption during updating, a mechanism that is preserved overall. In summary, our work advances literature about how phonological knowledge impacts verbal working memory updating.

Improving prospective memory in school-aged children: Effects of future thinking and performance predictions.

Recently, event-based prospective memory (PM) performance of children has been shown to benefit from different encoding strategies such as imagining the execution of a future PM task (i.e., future thinking) and making performance predictions (i.e., metacognitive monitoring). This study aimed to investigate whether and how these two encoding strategies affect PM performance alone and in combination. For this purpose, 127 children aged 8-11 years were assigned to four encoding conditions: (a) standard, (b) performance predictions, (c) future thinking, and (d) future thinking + performance predictions. The ongoing task performance costs (i.e., attentional monitoring), working memory (WM) span, and metacognitive monitoring judgments, such as task difficulty expectations, performance postdictions, confidence judgments, and strategy use, were also evaluated among participants. The results show that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions considerably improved children's PM performance without incurring additional attentional monitoring costs. Moreover, whereas children generally tended to overestimate their PM performance, more realistic lower-performance predictions were related to higher PM scores for children in the combined condition. Finally, age, WM, and strategy use significantly predicted PM performance independent of the encoding condition. This study is the first to demonstrate that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions enhances children's PM performance compared with each encoding strategy alone. Moreover, this work is the first to show that by simply imagining the execution of a PM task, children's prediction accuracy can be improved, which is significantly related to the PM performance advantage.

Memory updating through aging: different patterns for socially meaningful (and not) stimuli.

BACKGROUND: Updating is a crucial function responsible of working memory integrity, allowing relevant information to be active and inhibiting irrelevant one; updating has been studied mainly with verbal stimuli, less with faces, stimuli with high adaptive value and social meaning. AIM: Our aim was to test age-related differences in updating for different stimuli in three different age groups: young adults (range 20-30 years), young-old (range 60-75 years) and older-old participants (range 77-87 years). METHODS: To this end, we administered control measures (i.e., vocabulary and visuospatial tasks), span tasks (forward, backward) and two updating tasks: one with no socially relevant material (i.e., letters) and another one with socially relevant material (i.e., human faces, where, in particular, the combination between facial expression and gaze direction was manipulated). In both tasks we collected response times (RTs) at different steps of an updating task (i.e., encoding, maintaining, and updating goal-relevant information). RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: We found that age linearly produces an increase in processing speed regardless the stimulus considered, either letter or human face. However, with face stimuli, the magnitude of the difference is greater for the letter updating task, than for the face updating task. In turn, the results claim for a stimulus-specific updating process as the age-related decline is less pronounced when socially meaningful stimuli are involved than when no socially meaningful ones are.

Second-language learning difficulties in Italian children with reading difficulties.

BACKGROUND: Children with dyslexia often show second-language reading and writing difficulties, but the cognitive mechanisms connected to this impairment need to be clarified. AIMS: The present study examined the neuropsychological mechanisms underlying learning English as a foreign language in 4th- to the 8th-grade Italian students showing reading difficulties (RD) or typical development (TD). For this purpose, screening involving 901 students was carried out to select children with RD. SAMPLE: Ninety students with RD were compared with 90 typically developing (TD) children matched for non-verbal IQ, grade, and gender. METHODS: The two groups were compared on different measures to understand the relationships between reading skills in their mother tongue and in English as a second-language (L2). Subsequently, their phonological and memory skills were investigated to understand the potential role of these variables in learning L2 English. RESULTS: Students with RD obtained worse results than TD students for phonological awareness and working memory, which are both crucial to L2 learning. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that memory mainly influences accuracy in English writing and, together with phonological skills, plays an important role in reading accuracy. Socio-economic status also plays an important role in L2 learning.

Sensitivity detection in memory recognition: interference control as index of taxonomic memory development?

We investigated how long-term memory modulates recognition accuracy performance in typically developing primary school children (aged 7 vs. 9 years). We devised a verbal working memory task where words associations were manipulated to obtain different types of semantic associations (i.e., taxonomic, thematic). Sensitivity detection measures were operationalised as difference between hits and false alarms (for both internal and external intrusions). As our main result, we found sensitivity detection for taxonomic associations was greater in older children than younger. In turn, this showed that taxonomies produce more interference in younger children, and thus, they are not able to take advantage from taxonomic associations, as older children do. These results are helpful in sketching a developmental trend of how semantic memory impacts recognition processes in memory.

Long-term memory effects on working memory updating development.

Long-term memory (LTM) associations appear as important to cognition as single memory contents. Previous studies on updating development have focused on cognitive processes and components, whereas our investigation examines how contents, associated with different LTM strength (strong or weak), might be differentially updated at different ages. To this end, we manipulated association strength of information given at encoding, in order to focus on updating pre-existing LTM associations; specifically, associations for letters. In particular, we controlled for letters usage frequency at the sub-lexical level. We used a task where we dissociated inhibition online (i.e., RTs for updating and controlling inhibition from the same set) and offline (i.e., RTs for controlling inhibition from previously updated sets). Mixed-effect analyses were conducted and showed a substantial behavioural cost when strong associations had to be dismantled online (i.e., longer RTs), compared to weak ones; here, in primary school age children. Interestingly, this effect was independent of age; in fact, children from 7-8 to 9-10 years were comparably sensitive to the strength of LTM associations in updating. However, older children were more effective in offline inhibitory control.

Training RAN or reading? A telerehabilitation study on developmental dyslexia.

Rehabilitation procedures recommended for developmental dyslexia (DD) are still not fully defined, and only few studies directly compare different types of training. This study compared a training (Reading Trainer) working on the reading impairment with one (Run the RAN) working on the rapid automatized naming (RAN) impairment, one of the main cognitive deficits associated with DD. Two groups of DD children (N = 45) equivalent for age, sex, full IQ, and reading speed were trained either by Reading Trainer (n = 21) or by Run the RAN (n = 24); both trainings required an intensive home exercise, lasting 3 months. Both trainings showed significant improvements in reading speed and accuracy of passages and words. Bypassing the use of alphanumeric stimuli, but empowering the cognitive processes underlying reading, training RAN may be a valid tool in children with reading difficulties opening new perspectives for children with severe impairments or, even, at risk of reading difficulties.

Performance predictions and postdictions in prospective memory of school-aged children.

Prospective memory (PM) undergoes important developmental changes during the primary school years, particularly around 7 and 8 years of age. Recent studies have suggested that, as well as executive functions (EFs), PM development also benefits from age-related increments in metamemory (MM) abilities. The primary aim of the current study was to explore the role of MM monitoring and control processes (i.e., procedural MM) of 7- and 8-year-old children in a PM task including specific cues. Monitoring processes were assessed by asking children to judge their own PM performance before (predictions) and after (postdictions) in performing a PM task. In addition, children were asked to report the strategy they used to remember the PM task. Reactive effects of making predictions and using strategies were assessed via both an ongoing task (OT) and PM performance. EF and declarative MM performance was also examined. Results showed that children who were asked to predict PM performance had faster PM response times (RTs), but not higher accuracy rates, than children in a control group. However, strategy use affected both PM and OT performance, with those children reporting active strategy use obtaining higher PM accuracy rates and slower OT RTs. Finally, switching abilities were also predictive of OT performance. This investigation highlights the importance of studying MM monitoring and control processes in relation to children's PM.

Working Memory Updating: Load and Binding.

In the present study, we aimed to examine how specific objects are updated in working memory. We compared conditions in which contents or content-context bindings from working memory were both encoded and updated (Experiment 1). In addition, for bindings, we manipulated the memory load (i.e., number of contents) to maintain during updating. Results indicated that memory load did not specifically affect the process; rather, the content-context binding (vs. single contents) was critical in determining the increase in response latencies. Results were replicated even in Experiment 2, in which we manipulated the spatial locations of the to-be-recognized probes. Results showed evidence of a potential dissociation between updating of memory contents-only and content-context bindings. In addition, memory load and spatial coherence between phases and probe recognition did not interact with updating performance. Overall, results were taken as a contribution toward mapping the complex nature of the updating mechanism.

The role of declarative and procedural metamemory in event-based prospective memory in school-aged children.

Prospective memory (PM) develops considerably during the primary school years (7 or 8years of age). Developmental changes have been mainly related to executive functions, although it has been recently suggested that PM would also potentially benefit from metamemory (MM). To date, only procedural MM, operationalized as performance predictions, has been investigated in relation to PM, whereas declarative MM has remained unexplored. Adults' performance has been shown to improve with predictions, but only in a resource-demanding (i.e., categorical) PM task rather than a more automatic (i.e., specific) one. The aim of the current investigation was to study whether PM performance of 7-year-old children (N=59) would benefit from performance predictions. Thus, half of the children predicted their performance and half of them received standard instructions for two PM tasks: one including categorical PM targets and one including specific ones. To investigate the processes underlying the retrieval of PM targets and the effect of predictions, we obtained measures for declarative MM, inhibitory control, and working memory (WM). Results revealed that children benefitted from performance predictions in the categorical PM task but not in the specific one. This advantage caused slower ongoing task response times, suggesting that strategic monitoring processes were enhanced. Moreover, PM performance was related to WM capacity and declarative MM. However, declarative MM mainly predicted PM advantage in the prediction group, showing that children with high MM knowledge benefitted especially from performance predictions. These findings are the first showing the important relation among procedural MM, declarative MM, and PM in school-aged children.

How sublexical association strength modulates updating: Cognitive and strategic effects.

In the current study, we investigated updating of long-term memory (LTM) associations. Specifically, we examined sublexical associations by manipulating preexisting LTM relations between consonant couplets (in encoding and updating phases), and explicitly instructed participants to engage with a specific strategy for approaching the task (item disjunction, grouping, or none). In two experiments, we used a multistep subject-based memory updating task in which we measured processing response times (RTs; Exp. 1, Exp. 2) and recognition RTs (Exp. 2). For the first time, in both experiments, we found costs in dismantling strong pre-existing associations from LTM and benefits in recreating strong preexisting associations. In addition, we found that control of irrelevant information was more difficult when this belonged to a strong association. Regarding task strategies, we showed that inducing a disjunction strategy enhanced updating, no matter the strength of the association. Results were discussed in the light of updating as a process of dismantling and recreating associations. The role of a specific strategic approach in enhancing the updating was also discussed.

English as a Foreign Language in Bilingual Language-minority Children, Children with Dyslexia and Monolingual Typical Readers.

The present study was aimed at investigating literacy skills in English as a foreign language in three different groups of children: monolinguals with dyslexia (n = 19), typically developing bilinguals (language-minority) (n = 19) and a control group of monolinguals (Italian) (n = 76). Bilinguals were not expected to fail in English measures, and their gap with monolinguals would be expected to be limited to the instructional language, owing to underexposure. All participants were enrolled in Italian primary schools (fourth and fifth grades). A non-verbal reasoning task and Italian and English literacy tasks were administered. The Italian battery included word and non-word reading (speed and accuracy), word and non-word writing, and reading comprehension; the English battery included similar tasks, except for the non-word writing. Bilingual children performed similarly to typical readers in English tasks, whereas in Italian tasks, their performance was similar to that of typical readers in reading speed but not in reading accuracy and writing. Children with dyslexia underperformed compared with typically developing children in all English and Italian tasks, except for reading comprehension in Italian. Profile analysis and correlational analyses were further discussed. These results suggest that English as a foreign language might represent a challenge for students with dyslexia but a strength for bilingual language-minority children. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Updating working memory: memory load matters with aging.

Age-related effects in working memory updating were investigated by administering a response time-based task to three adult age groups (young, young-old, and old-old). The task differentiated objects to update; participants were asked to update single memory contents or content-context bindings. The data showed an overall delay of response latencies in the elderly groups (both young-old and old-old), relative to the younger. Specifically, each age group showed longer latencies for content-context binding updating, than single memory content updating. However, an interaction with age was obtained when memory load was manipulated across content-context binding updating conditions. These results were taken as evidence of differences between specific objects of updating and age-related changes in cognition and were discussed with reference to the relevant aging literature.

L2 Spelling Errors in Italian Children with Dyslexia.

The present study aimed to investigate L2 spelling skills in Italian children by administering an English word dictation task to 13 children with dyslexia (CD), 13 control children (comparable in age, gender, schooling and IQ) and a group of 10 children with an English learning difficulty, but no L1 learning disorder. Patterns of difficulties were examined for accuracy and type of errors, in spelling dictated short and long words (i.e. disyllables and three syllables). Notably, CD were poor in spelling English words. Furthermore, their errors were mainly related with phonological representation of words, as they made more 'phonologically' implausible errors than controls. In addition, CD errors were more frequent for short than long words. Conversely, the three groups did not differ in the number of plausible ('non-phonological') errors, that is, words that were incorrectly written, but whose reading could correspond to the dictated word via either Italian or English rules. Error analysis also showed syllable position differences in the spelling patterns of CD, children with and English learning difficulty and control children. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Modulation of working memory updating: Does long-term memory lexical association matter?

The aim of the present study was to investigate how working memory updating for verbal material is modulated by enduring properties of long-term memory. Two coexisting perspectives that account for the relation between long-term representation and short-term performance were addressed. First, evidence suggests that performance is more closely linked to lexical properties, that is, co-occurrences within the language. Conversely, other evidence suggests that performance is linked more to long-term representations which do not entail lexical/linguistic representations. Our aim was to investigate how these two kinds of long-term memory associations (i.e., lexical or nonlexical) modulate ongoing working memory activity. Therefore, we manipulated (between participants) the strength of the association in letters based on either frequency of co-occurrences (lexical) or contiguity along the sequence of the alphabet (nonlexical). Results showed a cost in working memory updating for strongly lexically associated stimuli only. Our findings advance knowledge of how lexical long-term memory associations between consonants affect working memory updating and, in turn, contribute to the study of factors which impact the updating process across memory systems.