Minecraft is a popular digital game-based learning (DGBL) tool used in learning environments around the world. With increasing emphasis on evidence-informed practice and policymaking in educational systems, this paper systematically reviews the evidence base behind the use of Minecraft in improving academic, cognitive, motivational-affective and…

The Home Learning Environment (HLE) focuses on everyday learning habits in families to support the development of children's early cognitive competencies. A growing number of studies have assessed the HLE by using different conceptual approaches and various assessment methods, often focusing on either the home literacy environment or the home…

Alignment between curriculum standards and teachers' classroom instructional practices is critical in assessing curriculum implementation effectiveness and students' learning. Using a modified version of the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) for music, this study explored the alignment between the enacted curriculum and the national curriculum…

Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…

This article assesses nutritional intake and adequacy in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), subdiagnostic autistic symptoms and children with typical development (TD). In total, 77 children diagnosed with ASD, 40 with subdiagnostic autistic symptoms and 333 children with TD were assessed. A validated food frequency questionnaire was…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Empathy and executive functions (EFs) are multimodal constructs that enable individuals to cope with their environment. Both abilities develop throughout childhood and are known to contribute to social behavior and academic performance in young adolescents. Notably, mentalizing and EF activate shared frontotemporal brain areas, which in previous…

This study examined the change in the attitudes of 70 Israeli Arab pre-service teachers for special education and their professional development resulting from combining three teaching methods (personal diaries, case studies and theoretical models) in a one-semester course. This mixed-methods study included close-ended questionnaires, open-ended…

The transition to early childhood education is important for all stakeholders. This study aimed to examine the expectations of teachers and parents whose children were starting school for the first time regarding themselves and each other during the preparation for and transition to school. Sixteen parents and eight teachers participated in the…

The inconsistent implementation of the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child framework within one school district has been a problem. The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of 17 participants (nine teachers, three school counselors, two librarians, two administrators, and one instructional coach) in a school…

Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge by using information produced by its evaluation and compensation reforms as the basis for effectiveness-adjusted payments that provided large compensating differentials to attract and retain effective…

This study aimed to replicate and extend findings from the only known study that has conducted latent profile analysis of developmental profiles, measured by the Battelle Developmental Inventory, for children in Early Intervention (EI). Children (N = 57,966) who were enrolled in Massachusetts EI sites between 2011 and 2019 and completed a Battelle…

Self-regulation in early childhood, including the ability to regulate one's own thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, are associated with a range of outcomes including academic performance, and social development. Research has extensively examined the effects of mother's parental involvement and parenting experiences, such as parenting stress and…

In this study (n = 1000, M[subscript age at K1entry] = 53.4 months, SD = 3.4; 53% females), we investigated the contributions of the family socioeconomic status (SES; maternal education and an income-related measure) and number and age of siblings to the development of children's math, reading, and working memory (WM) updating skills over the…

The COVID-19 context has created the most severe disruption to education systems in recent history. Its impact on child development was estimated comparing two cohorts of 4- to 6-year-old Uruguayan children: control (n = 34,355, 48.87% girls) and COVID cohort (n = 30,158, 48.95% girls) assessed between 2018 and 2020 in three waves, by a routinely…