Social-emotional skills are equally as crucial for school success as cognitive and academic skills (Webster-Stratton and Reid in "Infants and Young Children" 17:96-113, 2004), yet many young children lack these skills (Lavigne et al. in "Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry" 35:204-214, 1996).…

The technological advancement occurring in the world today has a potency to create positive and negative side effects especially on children. The positive side may entail increased empathy and acceptance of diversity through modelling the prosocial behaviours, while the negative can be manifest in aggressive behaviour, risky sexual behaviour, and…

In executing purposeful actions, adults select sufficient and necessary limbs. But infants often move goal-irrelevant limbs, suggesting a developmental process of motor specialization. Two experiments with 9- and 12-month-olds revealed gradual decreases in extraneous movements in non-acting limbs during unimanual actions. In Experiment 1,…

The article presents conceptual ideas, experience and results of the formation of cognitive motivation in junior-school age group children in extracurricular activities institutions. Such ideas include the junior school-age children motivation's structure, characteristics, basic pedagogical conditions, educational contents, and the criteria of the…

The cognitive perceptions that enable gifted children to process academic information in superior ways also qualitatively impact the psychosocial dimensions of their lives. Overexcitabilities represent common super-sensitive areas in gifted children. However, giftedness does not end with adulthood and neither do the complex processes of…

This article, based on theoretical reflections and empirical examples, outlines dilemmas in the social positioning of postgraduate research when students are challenged with their locations as insiders and outsiders in terms of the issues they investigate in Development Studies. Encountering the "other" and oneself in, against and beyond…

A warm and comprehensive child-centered approach to early childhood education "Who Am I in the Lives of Children? An Introduction to Early Childhood Education" reflects a practical, constructivist approach to early childhood education (birth to grade 3) and care programs that is dedicated to the development of the whole child--physical,…

Physical literacy has gained worldwide prominence over the last decade by re-conceptualizing primarily the meaning of physical education. British educator Margaret Whitehead is the most famous proponent of this expression and expositor of its philosophical foundation and value. As such, physical literacy rejects dualism, is buttressed by monism,…

This article investigates the early emergence of reason-giving. Toddlers are sensitive to disagreements, and they can track several kinds of informational access, such as visual perception. We investigated whether young children use these skills (a) when assessing whether providing reasons is needed and (b) when selecting appropriate behaviors to…

This research investigates the effect of production on 4.5- to 6-year-old children's recognition of newly learned words. In Experiment 1, children were taught four novel words in a produced or heard training condition during a brief training phase. In Experiment 2, children were taught eight novel words, and this time training condition was in a…

Two studies are presented to examine whether and why 3-5-year-olds in Pakistan display limited social understanding. Study 1 tested 71 preschoolers on Lillard and Flavell's (1992) test of desires, pretence and beliefs, plus two false belief tasks, and showed very limited understanding across these measures even though almost half were over 5 years…

The provision of Integrated Early Childhood Development (IECD) positively impacts children's futures physically, cognitively, emotionally and socially. The assessment sought to inform intervention programs to improve the status of children's physical, social-emotional, cognitive and educational needs, as well as their health and nutritional needs.…

Chinese kindergartens' over 110 years of adaptation of foreign models is a vivid example of how globalization comes into direct contact with Chinese culture and creates cultural hybridities. Learning Stories as a narrative assessment tool to children's development from New Zealand, has swept China with the endorsement from the professional…

This study examined associations between caregiver talk and language skills in full term (FT) and preterm (PT) children (n = 97). All-day recordings of caregiver-child interactions revealed striking similarities in amount of caregiver talk heard by FT and PT children. Children who heard more caregiver talk at 16 months demonstrated better…

Older interlocutors are more likely than younger ones to make pragmatic inferences, that is, inferences that go beyond the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence. Here we ask whether pragmatic development is associated with increased activity in brain structures associated with inference-making or in those associated with Theory of Mind. We…