Background/Context: There is a convergence of evidence that the quality of children's early care and education (ECE) experiences is critical for promoting children's development (Gormley, Phillips, & Gayer, 2008). Curriculum combined with professional development is thought to be the "strongest hope" for promoting quality (Weiland…

Metacognition is an essential, but habitually ignored element of 21st century education, which aims to teach students how to learn. 'Meta' is a Greek word meaning 'after', 'behind' or 'beyond'; 'meta' is added to terms such as meta memory, meta comprehension, and metacognition. The lack of consciousness is cognitive self-regulation activities…

Although almost everyone agrees that the environment shapes children's learning, surprisingly few studies assess in detail the specific environments that shape children's learning of specific content. The present article briefly reviews examples of how such environmental assessments have improved understanding of child development in diverse…

Although text messaging interventions targeting parents of older students have shown promise for improving a variety of outcomes, evidence on text-based outreach and support for parents of young children is just emerging. We explore programmatic data from a text-based mentoring intervention designed to support postpartum mothers and promote…

This study utilized the Minnesota Executive Function Scale to quantitatively explore the influence of nature preschools on executive function skills, which are a critical component of school readiness. Executive function skills are malleable skills that allow goal setting and follow through, skills that determine success in school and beyond. Four…

Africa's emerging leadership is made up of young people who have energy, passion, and vision for the continent. Harnessed well, this passion and energy will ensure African countries will be able to benefit from an array of human capital that can take the early childhood development agenda on the continent forward. But many challenges stand in the…

Play as a teaching approach is a contemporary research area in early years that needs to be clearly defined. Early childhood teachers support the use of play, however the implementation of play as a teaching tool lacks clarity. This phenomenological study aimed to investigate early childhood teachers' perceptions and experiences of play-based…

All children are placemakers (Chawla, 1992). While we know that a child's sense of place is linked to a sense of belonging (Brillante & Mankiw, 2015), the implications of placemaking in the lived experiences of child readers, specifically, has not been widely explored. The primary purpose of this literature review is to aid reader response…

In this paper, authors reflect on the implications of the report titled "Bold Beginnings: The Reception Curriculum in a Sample of Good and Outstanding Primary Schools" (Ofsted, 2017). This report is a review of curriculum for four-and five-year-old children in the United Kingdom. The "Bold Beginnings" report argues for teaching…

Developmental delays (DD) are missed early childhood developmental milestones in cognitive, motoric or linguistic domains. DD associated with behaviour problems may compound to impact parenting. This study investigated whether DD would moderate the relation between behaviour problems and parenting in families of toddlers. Data were drawn from an…

Coordinated attention between children and their parents plays an important role in their social, language, and cognitive development. The current study used head-mounted eye-trackers to investigate the effects of children's prelingual hearing loss on how they achieve coordinated attention with their hearing parents during free-flowing object…

Although almost everyone agrees that the environment shapes children's learning, surprisingly few studies assess in detail the specific environments that shape children's learning of specific content. The present article briefly reviews examples of how such environmental assessments have improved understanding of child development in diverse…

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring…

Previous research has shown that the quality of mother-child interactions between pre-term children and their mothers tends to be poorer than that of full-term children and their mothers (Forcada-Guex, Pierrehumbert, Borghini, Moessinger & Muller-Nix, 2006). Mothers of pre-term children are less responsive and more intrusive in interactions…

Observational data collected prior to the pandemic (between 2004 and 2019) were used to simulate the potential consequences of early childhood care and education (ECCE) service closures on the estimated 167 million preprimary-age children in 196 countries who lost ECCE access between March 2020 and February 2021. COVID-19-related ECCE disruptions…