This report was commissioned by the Local Government Association (LGA) to inform the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and LGA work on "Narrowing the Gap." It focuses on early years' provision and presents findings from a review of the best evidence on narrowing the gap in outcomes across the five Every Child Matters…

A large proportion of the UK adult population has very poor literacy and/or numeracy skills (see the 1999 Moser Report, the 2003 "Skills for Life" Survey and the 2006 Leitch report). In 1999, the Moser report found that approximately 20% of adults in England had severe literacy difficulties, whilst around 40% had some numeracy problems.…

The Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) scale has been shown to be a significant predictor of later cognitive outcomes in many cultures. Therefore identifying factors associated with HOME could be used to promote child development. Maternal psychological well-being is often overlooked although critical in the creation of…

Proximal environmental variables illustrate aspects of the environment that are experienced directly and specifically by the child. The current study examined the associations between three proximal environmental variables: (1) quality of the home environment, (2) regularity of family routines and (3) frequency of parenting daily hassles and…

This document examines the use of measurement tools to evaluate children's psychological development. The first part of the document discusses the identification and quantification of developmental landmarks and the reasons for evaluation. The second part reviews several evaluation instruments. The Ruth Griffiths mental development scales are used…

Piaget's concept of "internalization" is analyzed and related to Bruner's representational theories of cognitive development. Cognitive structures are shown to be real exclusively in an actual representation. (Author/SDH)

A study was conducted to test an hypothesis relating semantic structures to cognitive development, specifically that the mean number of associative complexes used by a group of children will be significantly greater than the mean number of associative complexes used by a group of adolescents. The word game "Password" provided a simulation of a…

The review surveys theories and models of human development and extrapolates from these to form a composite sketch of the "typical" deaf adolescent. Theories of J. Piaget are examined and the major stages of cognitive development he proposed are summarized. Implications of concepts of disequilibrium and restructuring of cognitive schemas…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between the physical, social, and psychological variables of the family environment and children's developmental performance on measures of cognition, academic achievement, and affective characteristics. A sample of 69 families was administered a multicomponent family assessment…

The purpose of this paper is to present some evidence linking malnutrition to physical development, brain development, infection, environment, learning and behavior. (CS)

Assesses Vertical Home Start, a program which provided children with readiness enrichment over a period of three years while the children were from two to five years of age. Results indicate that there is little durability to short-term verbal gains. However, longitudinal assessment is advised since some scores do vacillate. (HMV)

First and second graders (n=81) were randomly partitioned into experimental and control groups. The experimentals were given experiences in sorting and seriating objects. Significant treatment and grade effects (p.01) were found on a seriation test, but no significant relationships between classification and transitivity nor seriation and…

Formulates further propositions towards a comprehensive structural developmental theory of cognitive change with focus on: a) organization of subject's assimilatory operations and accomodatory figurations; b) intrinsic coordinations between the theoretical and empirical cognitions constructed, respectively, by these two kinds of functional…

A study proposing reality and fantasy discrimination of television content as a classificatory ability sought to identify differences between subjects who were able to make sophisticated reality-fantasy judgements and those who were not, and factors which might contribute to a subject's sophistication in discrimination. Open-ended and structured…

This review of the current state of research on how children make sense of television and its content examines age-related differences in children's interpretations of television entertainment content in general, and advertising content in particular. A brief analysis and description of the fundamental principles of cognitive development theory…