Seriation refers to the process of ordering objects along single or multiple magnitude dimensions such as length, weight, and color. The ability to order objects in terms of some attribute is essential for the child's understanding of the properties of numbers. This study investigated the effect on seriation performance of increasing both the…

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) compiled this summary in order to assist states and jurisdictions in their delinquency prevention efforts. The summary provides a synthesis of current information on a broad range of programs and strategies which seek to prevent delinquency. The theory of risk-focused prevention is…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how children's responses to literature can help develop literacy. The subjects were 15 first-grade students at Overstreet Elementary School in Starkville (Mississippi). Two school observations were carried out prior to the collection of data on individual students. Case studies were conducted…

Libraries are faced with changing demographics, emerging technologies, and economic shifts. Families once attended library programs as a unit, children began kindergarten at age five, and libraries offered few programs for children under four. Intact and extended families are a thing of the past. Many children today are raised in single parent…

A study analyzed ideas expressed by 38 parents of 4- to 5-year-old children about their socialization goals and the best ways of helping their child to attain them, with special attention to the domain of literacy. All the participating families had a child enrolled in kindergarten or first grade, all included an older child, and all were…

This book presents a comprehensive and detailed theory of early human development based on the principles of dynamic systems theory. It raises fundamental questions about prevailing assumptions in the field and proposes a new theory of the development of cognition and action, unifying recent advances in dynamic systems theory with current research…

Knowing how people learn and why they learn in a specific manner unlocks the mysteries of good teaching. Many learning style differences are related to Piagetian stages of cognitive development. Students' stages of cognitive development may not correspond to their ages and achievements. Piaget also found that many individuals are at different…

This booklet for caregivers of infants and toddlers with disabilities is intended to provide an overview of early childhood development, from birth to 36 months of age. The booklet is organized into 3-month age spans for the first year, 6-month age spans for the second year, and a 12-month age span for the third year. For each level, typical…

Noting that parents need to recognize that fears are a normal part of a child's development and that a child must be helped to deal with them, this book provides a very practical approach to fear reduction in a user-friendly form. The first part of the book, for parents, discusses: (1) definitions of fear and fear symptoms in children; (2) the…

A proposed model of communicative behavior suggests a series of seven progressively more complex levels of communicative competence: (1) behavior state; (2) recognitory; (3) contingency; (4) instrumental; (5) triadic; (6) verbal-contextual; and (7) verbal-decontextual. Tables define these levels in detail and list their characteristics. Each level…

This paper describes how the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is using constructivist theory and research to inform educational policy and practice. The state's most concentrated and comprehensive effort in this direction is Project Construct, a unified instructional approach for children ages 3-7. The project consists of…

This study examined infants' change in visual information pick-up, from an infant-like stimulus-locked visual scanning pattern to an adult-like cognitive control of visual information pick-up. Subjects were 21 children between 25 and 42 months of age. Eye movements were videotaped in a preferential looking situation and later analyzed as still…

Noting that parents raising adolescents need to know when to be quiet and when to act, as well as what to do when something needs to be done, this guide for parents offers guidelines for handling the complex situations and dilemmas that teenagers often present. Topics covered include managing teenage risk-taking, the relationship between…

A study examined preschoolers' metacognitive self-regulatory behaviors. It was hypothesized that tasks that omitted or greatly decreased verbalization would allow preschool children to exhibit evidence of metacognitive self-regulatory behaviors. Subjects were 20 preschool children, half identified as special needs and half designated as typical…

The study sought to examine developmental processes of substitution in the pretend play of Down's syndrome children and to clarify the onset mechanism of subskills in decontextualization, which refers to the progress from imitation to substitution and then to invention. Eighteen Japanese children, aged 29-55 months, with Down's syndrome were given…