Play is a fundamental concept in early childhood development and education. As partners in the child's learning, parents play a crucial role in how play is defined, valued, and practised. The present study explores the constructs of parents' beliefs about and engagement in young children's play in two coastal cities in China. A sample of 483…

Research conducted in recent decades shows that parental involvement (PI) plays a significant role in the academic achievement and the healthy development of children. Gaining a better understanding of early childhood educators' views and the reasons for insufficient practices is important for improving PI. This mixed-method research investigates…

This study explored transactional associations among visuomotor integration, attention, fine motor coordination, and mathematics skills in a diverse sample of one hundred thirty-five 5-year-olds (kindergarteners) and one hundred nineteen 6-year-olds (first graders) in the United States who were followed over the course of 2 school years.…

This study examined cultural beliefs about ASD and its causes among Mexican-heritage families. In focus group interviews, we asked 25 immigrant parents of children with ASD to identify words they associated with ASD and its causes. Participants free-listed, ranked, and justified their responses. Mixed methods analyses utilized saliency scores to…

High pedagogical quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is related to developmental outcomes in young children. This review summarizes findings from (quasi)-experimental studies that evaluated in-service training effects for ECEC professionals on external quality ratings and child development. The aggregation of findings at teacher…

The emergence of strategic verbal rehearsal at around 7 years of age is widely considered a major milestone in descriptions of the development of short-term memory across childhood. Likewise, rehearsal is believed by many to be a crucial factor in explaining why memory improves with age. This apparent qualitative shift in mnemonic processes has…

This article sets out to look critically at the use of systematic reviews in the cross-disciplinary field of early childhood and international development. Systematic reviews--a specialist methodology involving the secondary analysis of existing knowledge on a particular topic--is prevalently used to address complex questions in social and…

Vygotsky measured his 'zone of proximal development' in years. To do this, he needed a scheme of age periods, and a set of tasks that could diagnose the next age period without defining it. In this paper, we compare the age periods in his late lectures with Halliday's categories of logico-semantic expansion as used by three adolescent…

Primary education is compulsory around the world. This means that around age 5 or 6, millions of children worldwide transition from home or preschool/kindergarten settings into primary school, with the success of this transition shaping school and life trajectories for years to come. Both developmental and environmental factors during early…

Turkey is home to 1.2 million child refugees whom has been the most vulnerable since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, which is considered to be the worst humanitarian crisis of this century. More than 50% of school age child refugees are out of school (UNICEF, 2017) in Turkey. This paper reports one of the findings of a case study of a…

This case study explores child, parent, teacher, and school-leader perspectives of a play-based learning (Pb-L) approach in one new-entrant classroom. Data were gathered through focus groups, interviews and an online survey. Findings indicate that children valued the opportunity for self-initiated, handson, interest-based exploration and social…

It is a matter of concern when large, federally funded programs are evaluated using designs that produce misleading information. In this article, we discuss problems associated with an evaluation design that was adopted by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) to document the performance of a major early…

Museum visits can offer rich learning environments for preschool children. In potentiating learning environments, power is shared between adults and children as children and teachers co-construct understanding. Such learning environments also maximise opportunities for dialogue between adults, children and their peers. Drawing on the findings from…

This article discusses giftedness from the inside out, focusing on what the differences mean to the gifted child's experience of life--the effects both their intensity and their cognitive abilities have on their inner experience and awareness. Mindfulness is especially valuable and important for the profoundly gifted child. Two programs that use…

Research Findings: This study investigated the relationship between family socioeconomic status (SES) and children's early attainment, and the roles of preschool attendance and executive function (EF) in this association. Participants were 3,331 children (1,584 girls) ranging in age from 36 to 71 months from Cambodia, Mongolia, and Vanuatu.…