ABSTRACT
Children's progress through middle childhood is greatly affected by their experience of school. Formal schooling provides children with the opportunity to master new skills that are relevant to the solution of concrete operational reasoning problems. In particular, school intro duces children to the skills of literacy and numeracy. Literacy-the ability to read and write-has important implications both for language and the acquisition of knowledge. Children who can read are able to learn new words and to build up sophisticated vocabularies. They can also use reading as an important new way of gaining knowledge of the world. Numeracy provides the opportunity for acquiring the ability to work within a formal system that uses rules and symbols.
