Explain how the development of information processing affects children's mastery of academic skills

What will be an ideal response?

Reading makes use of many skills at once, taxing all aspects of our information-processing system. Becoming a proficient reader is a complex process that begins in the preschool years. Children's active efforts to construct literacy knowledge through informal experiences are called emergent literacy.
The more informal literacy experiences preschoolers have, the better their language and emergent literacy development and their later reading skills. Gains in processing speed foster school-age children's rapid conversion of visual symbols into sounds.
Mathematical reasoning, like reading, builds on informally acquired knowledge. Between 14 and 16 months, toddlers display a beginning grasp of ordinality, or order relationships between quantities. Sometime in the third year, children begin to count, followed quickly by a grasp of cardinality—that the last word in a counting sequence indicates the quantity of items in a set. Over the early elementary school years, children acquire basic math facts through a combination of frequent practice, reasoning about number concepts, and teaching that conveys effective strategies.
The capacity to reason like a scientist improves with age, but young participants often discount obviously causal variables, ignore evidence conflicting with their own initial judgments, and distort evidence in ways consistent with their theory. Children—instead of viewing evidence as separate from and bearing on a theory—often blend the two into a single representation of "the way things are." The ability to distinguish theory from evidence and use logical rules to examine their relationship improves from childhood through adolescence, continuing into adulthood.