As young as 3 years old, children rely on a mutual intentionality framework to confer group membership--that is, agreement between a joiner ("I want to be in your group") and group ("We want you to be in our group"). Here, we tested whether children apply this cognitive framework in the context of identity-based groups,…

Shy-withdrawn behaviours place preschoolers at increased risk of experiencing adverse developmental outcomes. Positive teacher-child relationships play a protective role against these negative socioemotional outcomes. This study aimed to understand, in-depth, the beliefs, practices and support needs of preschool teachers toward shy-withdrawn…

A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current…

During the last few years, the Swedish preschool curriculum has undergone several changes. Among those changes is the introduction of the concept of teaching as a goal-oriented activity. Preschool teachers have been given a specific responsibility for leading the teaching in preschool. This study aims to explore how preschool teachers' didactical…

Teachers' general pedagogical knowledge (GPK) has been emphasized as an important factor in pupils' learning, although a gap appears when describing this concept in the context of school practices. The aim of this study is to identify how teachers define and use GPK in their everyday teaching. Data were collected using video stimulated recall…

This article explores video-stimulated recall as a novel approach to understanding children's decisions to engage in relational and physical aggression. Past studies have relied on caregiver and observer reports to investigate children's social behaviors, omitting children's experience and interpretation of their own behavior. Within this…

Research framed by evolving sociocultural theories have been fundamental in advancing the study of early childhood literacies. More recently the field has been enriched by posthumanist theories that have shifted the analytic gaze from children's participation in literacy practices and events, to the fluid relationality of literacies. Concurrently,…

This theoretical article aims to create a conceptual framework for future research on digital methods for assessing cognition in children through estimating shared intentionality, different from assessing through behavioral markers. It shows the new assessing paradigm based directly on the evaluation of parent-child interaction exchanges…

Early identification of young children at developmental risk is important for linkage to needed services. Yet, despite guidelines for developmental screening, many pediatricians do not systematically use screening tools. Because many young children spend time in childcare settings, conducting screening in these settings may improve rates of early…

The goal of this intensive longitudinal study was to trace the developmental trajectories of infant pointing production, through consideration of the modality (i.e. pointing alone vs pointing-vocal coupling) and the communicative intention (i.e. imperative vs declarative). Multilevel analysis was used to model the normative trend and the…

Given the hegemony of developmentalism in early childhood education and care, this article uses a poetic juxtapositional approach to bewilder Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Critical consideration of how the theory of cognitive development has contributed to the imagining of a universal, ahistorical child and childhood(s) are discussed…

When and how do children develop an understanding of the subjectivity of intentions? Intentions are subjective mental states in many ways. One way concerns their aspectuality: Whether or not a given behavior constitutes an intentional action depends on how, under which aspect, the agent represents it. Oedipus, for example, intended to marry…

"Research Findings:" Despite the importance of early care and education (ECE) for children's early learning and parents' labor force participation, workers average low pay with few benefits. The precarity of work and low compensation contribute to staff turnover and other problems, with potential implications for staff well-being,…

Amid the ongoing tension between an authentic teaching/learning of English and the increasing encroachment of assessments, teachers might gain support for a "meaning-making" approach by dialoguing with an earlier generation of English educators who balanced "skills" and "cultural heritage" with a "personal…

This study establishes a sequence of developing mental state understandings in infants. We used three violation-of-expectation paradigms to assess fifty-seven 16-month-olds' ability to (a) infer an actress's intention from her prior repeated approaches to an object, (b) recognize her emotion by watching her facial-emotional display, and (c) deduce…