Early cognitive predictors of language, literacy, and mathematics outcomes in the primary grades

• Recent cross-domain research is highlighting the shared and unique early cognitive predictors of later achievements in language, reading, and mathematics. • Early cognitive predictors clustered together as expected as well as overlapped in non-obvious ways (e.g., math tasks cross-loaded with early language and literacy). • Kindergarten verbal and symbolic skills independently predicted grade 1 outcomes. • By grade two, early verbal skills continued to predict language grades as did grade 1 marks, whereas symbolic skills had indirect effects through grade 1. • Results are discussed in terms of screening practices across academic domains. Recently, cross-domain research has shown that some early cognitive precursors of language, reading, and mathematics overlap and predict one another. This study investigated how early cognitive predictors across domains could predict future academic skills across domains using data from 563 students in kindergarten to second grade (ages 5 to 8; 288 males; largely monolingual English). The roles of verbal, symbolic, and magnitude comparison skills as predictors of later academic grades for various language and math subjects were examined. Results found that Grade 1 marks were predicted by kindergarten verbal and symbolic skills, while Grade 2 marks were predicted by verbal skills and Grade 1 as well as indirectly by symbolic skills via Grade 1. Results are discussed in light of the overlapping relationships between language, reading, and mathematics.