Research Findings: The COVID-19 pandemic is leading to an unprecedented crisis worldwide. With schools closed, the frequency with which Spanish parents engage in home literacy activities with their children between the ages of 2 and 8 and the sociodemographic variables that influence this collaboration are unknown. The present research aimed to understand interactions among parents and children in the context of literacy activities at home. A total of 337 Spanish parents completed the Home Literacy Activities Questionnaire (HLAQ). Results from the reliability test showed a good adequacy and consistency (Cronbach’s alpha .85), and a factorial analysis indicated all items could be grouped into four factors: reading activities, writing activities, digital literacy activities, and dialogic-creative literacy activities. A latent class cluster analysis, based on parents’ factorial scores in the HLAQ and their sociodemographic data, suggested four discrete parental clusters: parents prioritizing writing activities, interested in practicing all type of literacy activities, willing to do digital activities, or ready to practice dialogic-creative literacy activities. All indicators and sociodemographic characteristics – the children’s age, the number of children in the family, and the parents’ educational level – were significant and discriminated among the parental clusters. The activities carried out with least frequency were dialogic-creative literacy activities and digital literacy activities. Practice or Policy: Schools, as well as researchers, must be intentional about engaging families who may not be aware of certain activities to support their young children’s literacy skills, in times of crisis, for all children and families, for specific groups of families and children, and at varying grade levels.

Purpose: Fostering student’s map reading skills, specifically understanding contour lines, is a challenging area of the Physical Education curriculum. Method: 238 students in their first year of secondary education (Mage = 13.1) were randomly assigned to one of these experimental conditions in physical education classes: (a) Teaching intervention 1 (TI-1): integrating the concept of contour lines into practical sessions of acrobatic gymnastics; (b) TI-2: theoretical sessions regarding contour lines; (c) Active control (AC): reading an introductory text about topographic maps; and two passive controls (PC) without any intervention, (d) PC-1 and (e) PC-2. Results: All students, except for PC-2, improved their knowledge of contour lines. Nevertheless, performing corporal figures (in TI-1) and employing pointing and tracing gestures (in TI-2) helped students to correctly resolve a broader range of tasks. Conclusions: The results highlighted the benefits of teaching proposals that favor movement and the experience of the body.

The role of gender in mathematical abilities has caught the interest of researchers for several decades; however, their findings are not conclusive yet. Recently the need to explore its influence on the development of some foundational mathematic skills has been highlighted. Thus, the current study examined whether gender differentially affects young children’s performance in several basic numeracy skills, using a complex developmentally appropriate assessment that included not only standard curriculum-based measures, but also a non-routine task which required abstract thinking. Further, 136 children (68 girls) aged 6 to 8 years old completed: (a) the third edition of the standardized Test of Early Mathematical Ability (TEMA-3) to measure their mathematical knowledge; (b) the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (K-BIT), and (c) a non-routine counting detection task where children watched several characters performing different counts, had to judge their correctness, and justify their answers. Furthermore, frequentist and Bayesian analyses were combined to quantify the evidence of the null (gender similarities) and the alternative (gender differences) hypothesis. The overall results indicated the irrelevance or non-existence of gender differences in most of the measures used, including children’s performance in the non-routine counting task. This would support the gender similarity hypothesis in the basic numerical skills assessed.