The relationship between preschoolers' puzzlemaking strategies and part-whole perception was investigated in the present study. Forty-eight two year olds and 48 four year olds were randomly selected from eight licensed childcare centers. Puzzlemaking strategies (image, form, color, and trial and error) were measured by performance in the…

Ninety-six Colombian children (mean age = 7.7 years) and adolescents (mean age = 14.6 years) made judgments about stealing and physical harm in the abstract and in the context of survival and revenge. All participants judged it wrong to steal or hurt others because of considerations with justice and welfare, and most also judged it wrong to engage…

The phrase "school readiness" was, until recently, most often used in connection with a child's preparedness to meet the demands of a first grade classroom. With the contemporary push down of the curriculum, readiness is now taken to mean the child's preparedness to meet the demands of kindergarten. Whether in regard to first grade or…

The first few years of life represent a crucial period for optimal brain development for young children. Therefore, it is important to identify children at-risk for developmental delays, including autism spectrum disorders, at the earliest age possible. An argument for utilizing community childcare providers for universal developmental screening…

The influence of three mechanisms of working memory (phonological short-term memory (PSTM capacity), attentional resource control/allocation, and processing speed) on children's complex (and simple) sentence comprehension was investigated. Fifty two children (6-12 years) completed a nonword repetition task (indexing PSTM), concurrent verbal…

Developmental trajectories provide the empirical foundation for theories about change processes during development. However, the ability to distinguish among alternative trajectories depends on how frequently observations are sampled. This study used real behavioral data, with real patterns of variability, to examine the effects of sampling at…

The authors examined the effects of welfare programs that increased maternal employment and family income on the development of very young children using data from 5 random-assignment experiments. The children were 6 months to 3 years old when their mothers entered the programs; cognitive and behavioral outcomes were measured 2-5 years later.…

Statements of need are used promiscuously by caretakers and children. The term may refer to mere wants (desire), to wants that have become socialized into secondary needs, to needs inferred by adults based on interpretations of future adaptive requirements, as well as to fundamental needs required for a child's well-being. It is important to…

There is evidence for developmental hierarchies in the type of information to which infants attend when reasoning about objects. Investigators have questioned the origin of these hierarchies and how infants come to identify new sources of information when reasoning about objects. The goal of the present experiments was to shed light on this debate…

This study provides an extension of analysis concerned with adult questioning carried out in the Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY) study. The REPEY study drew on robust quantitative data provided by the Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) project to identify the particular pedagogical strategies being applied…

Few studies have examined how experiences associated with being an undocumented immigrant parent affects children's development. In this article, the authors apply social exclusion theory to examine how access to institutional resources that require identification may matter for parents and children in immigrant families. As hypothesized, groups…

This study describes the development of emotional and behavioral regulation in a regional cohort of children born extremely preterm (less than 28 weeks gestational age, n = 39), very preterm (less than 34 weeks gestational age, n = 56), and full term (n = 103). At 2 and 4 years, children born at younger gestational ages demonstrated poorer…

Seven hundred thirty-one income-eligible families in 3 geographical regions who were enrolled in a national food supplement program were screened and randomized to a brief family intervention. At child ages 2 and 3, the intervention group caregivers were offered the Family Check-Up and linked parenting support services. Latent growth models on…

Developmental research suggests that whereas very young infants individuate objects purely on spatiotemporal grounds, from (at latest) around 1 year of age children are capable of individuating objects according to the kind they belong to and the properties they instantiate. As the latter ability has been found to correlate with language, some…

Children observe, listen, feel, taste, and take apart while exploring everything in their environment. Teachers can cultivate nature investigations with very young children by offering infants natural objects they can explore and investigate. When adults introduce nature in the earliest stages of development, children will be open to new ideas and…