The author of this article asks: What is readiness for kindergarten? How do we know when a child is ready? Unfortunately, as with many topics in education reform and improvement, policy makers ignore the complex questions about readiness and instead focus narrowly on select variables. The focus for kindergarten readiness is on select literacy and…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the existing transactional associations between mother-child conflict and the child's internalising and externalising problems. To this end, longitudinal data were used, covering ages 7-15. The sample consisted of 1,136 mothers and their children who participated in the National Institute of…

Few studies have investigated how stress affects eyewitness identification capabilities across development, and no studies have investigated whether retrieval context in conjunction with stress affects accuracy. In this study, one hundred fifty-nine 7- to 8- and 12- to 14-year-olds completed a high- or low-stress laboratory protocol during which…

We show that children in the Tsimane', a farming-foraging group in the Bolivian rain-forest, learn number words along a similar developmental trajectory to children from industrialized countries. Tsimane' children successively acquire the first three or four number words before fully learning how counting works. However, their learning is…

This study explored the developmental trajectories of academic achievement and the contributions of early social behaviors and problems to these trajectories in Chinese children. Data were collected each year in 5 consecutive years from a sample of elementary schoolchildren in China (initially N = 1,146, 609 boys, initial M [subscript age] = 8.33…

In this article, we draw on the theoretical and empirical literature to name what appear to be core dimensions of successful young adult development. We also describe some possible indicators and measures of those dimensions and sketch the kinds of developmental relationships and opportunities young people need in adolescence to effectively…

The purpose of this article is to explore the way preschool teachers teach reflective care in Japan. The article builds on a two-month ethnographic study conducted in Japanese kindergartens and nurseries among children aged 3-6 years. The data were analysed using concepts of age and gender. The results show that care in Japan, in contrast to…

Children with Attention-Deficiency/Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) often have co-existing learning disabilities and developmental weaknesses or delays in some areas including speech (Rief, 2005). Seeing that phonological disorders include articulation errors and other forms of speech disorders, studies pertaining to children with ADHD symptoms who…

In the summer of 1899, [John] Dewey gave two series of talks at Honolulu High School on Tuesday and Friday evenings from 8:00 to 10:00. The first set of five lectures was entitled "The Life of the Child;" the second set, "Movements in Nineteenth Century Thought." The first talk of the lecture series was delivered on the evening…

Despite general consensus that parenting practices influence the developmental processes of children, many questions about the impacts of parenting practices on child development within the cultural context remain unanswered. This article presents how cultural templates influence parenting practices and developmental processes of young children.…

Perceived social support has been shown to be one of the most important protective factors for emerging adult students during their transition to university. However, the relationships between perceived social support and dimensions of gender and family background, which have been shown to affect adjustment to college life, remain unexplored. The…

The study investigated the influence of geographical location, gender and age on the performance of Piagetian Conservation tasks. Four conservation tasks; conservation of liquid, length, substance amount and number respectively were administered to children [4-6 years] from rural and urban Ghana and their performance on each task were recorded.…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…

Neighbourhood Density (ND) and Phonotactic Probability (PP) influence word learning in children. This influence appears to change over development but the separate developmental trajectories of influence of PP and ND on word learning have not previously been mapped. This study examined the cross-sectional developmental trajectories of influence of…

Recent research has shown that by 30 months of age, children can successfully update their representation of an absent object's location on the basis of new verbal information, whereas 23-month-olds often return to the object's prior location. The current results show that this updating failure persisted even when (a) toddlers received visual and…