Prior research suggests that exposure to conflict can negatively impact the development of executive functioning, which in turn can affect academic performance. Recognizing the need to better understand the potentially widespread executive function deficiencies among Palestinian students and to help develop educational resources targeted to youth…

Solving formal analogy problems requires the identification of an initial term and the transformation that occurs between the initial two terms as well as the determination of the final term. Experiment 1 tested 24-month-olds' ability to determine final terms when they were shown the initial term and told the transformation that was to occur.…

Notions of "being" and "becoming" are intrinsic to childhood research. Whilst the "being" child is seen as a social actor actively constructing "childhood," the "becoming" child is seen as an "adult in the making," lacking competencies of the "adult" that he or she will "become." However, I argue that both approaches are in themselves…

The author comments on Diederik Janssen's essay "ReQueering Queer Youth Development: A Post-Developmental Approach to Childhood and Pedagogy," commenting that Janssen's analysis can inform both both materialist and post-structuralist understandings of children's sexuality by shifting focus from children as fetishized objects or as a group…

Immigrant children are an under-researched yet a steadily growing group. It is therefore compelling for practitioners to understand challenges these children are likely to encounter in the classroom so as to effectively meet their needs. In this article various theoretical perspectives of prominent child development theories are analyzed in an…

There is considerable policy interest in understanding the role of child care in children's development. Yet little research has examined whether individual children experience changes in child care quality across their early years, and less has included children's varying levels of exposure to care in analyses of child care trajectories. Using…

Child Trends has been asked by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to identify key opportunities that a new Administration might pursue to improve the capacity of the federal statistical system to monitor child and youth well-being. In this paper the authors discuss a number of areas of opportunity, offering concrete steps that can be taken, generally…

In this article, the author suggests that college educators need to do more than tell students how to expand upon their careerist reasons for going to college; they also need to help them "feel" the value of that expansion. The author recognizes that this is part of the motivation for proposed structural changes to undergraduate education, such as…

An empirical study is presented that tests a novel prediction generated by the Metaphor-by-Pattern-Completion (MPC) connectionist model of metaphor comprehension (Thomas & Mareschal, 2001). The MPC model predicts a developmental progression in the way that children process metaphors, from a preference for basic-level metaphors to a preference for…

In Part 1 of this article, the author described how the development of the early childhood workforce is affected by institutions of higher education (IHEs). In this follow-up article, she describes some promising practices in early childhood workforce development that create pathways for ECE professionals and the challenges these present to IHEs.…

Contemporary approaches to early childhood education widely acknowledge that young children's relationships with others play a fundamental role in their learning and development. This article explores the construct of relationships within the context of early childhood infant programmes through an examination of the contribution and applicability…

I present a selective history of the evolution of the study of altruism and helping behavior, using a series of questions and answers. Some of the topics covered include the motives for helping, the origins of helping and altruism in evolution and child development, the relationship of organizations to helping, and the psychological and health…

This study investigated 15- and 18-month-olds' understanding of the link between actions and emotions. Infants watched a videotape in which three adult models performed an action on an object. Each adult expressed the same emotion (positive, negative, or neutral affect) on completion of the action. Infants were subsequently given 20 seconds to…

"Developmental Planning" is the thinking process of using developmental milestones as a general basis for planning and predicting needs for the child within the early years. It considers the time frames associated with normal development across all facets of the child's development. The areas include bone and joint development, movement, sensory…

This research examined children's questions and the reactions to the answers they receive in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers' (ages 2-4 years) causal questions in…