Imagine the complex factors that influence a child's opportunities in life set on either side of an old-fashioned scale. The teeter-totter of each child's scale can be influenced by parents, schools, communities and, in many ways, public policies. Positive experiences and influences--a loving and nurturing caregiver, a safe and stable place to…

Written by one of the leading experts on assessment, the new edition of this book offers a clear explanation of the role of assessment in the revised Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), and step-by-step guidance for those working with children from birth to five on making and recording observations in practice. Updated throughout, the second…

In 2013, Drs Allen and Adele Gottfried shared the Fullerton longitudinal data with us. The data provided a unique opportunity to investigate the intellectual development and the longitudinal relation between intelligence and academic achievement. Previous studies have seldom addressed the latent nature of intelligence and academic achievement.…

In this study, we address the construction of the first symbolic uses of objects in contexts of triadic interaction (adult-child-object). We assume that symbolic productions are based on public rules of the use of objects previously agreed by the community. The first symbols are not rooted in any literal, evident reality, but in shared rules of…

Susan Mayclin Stephenson tackles a large subject, Cosmic Education, which Montessori defined as a "unifying global and universal view[s] of the past, present and future." Stephenson takes the reader from birth to the end of the elementary age with examples of how the child grows into an understanding of Cosmic Education through their…

A long standing argument in philosophy purports that friendship plays a considerable role in our self-knowledge and perspectives on the world, much of which can be accredited to the enduring influence of the Aristotelian conceptualisation of friendship. More recent thinking on friendship terminations has given cause to rethink and clarify the…

Understanding the process of attachment formation in young children has been a focal point in child development research for decades. However, young children's attachments are not only with human beings; they also form bonds with companion animals, particularly dogs ("Canis familiaris"). Given the number of dogs that are kept by families…

The population of young dual language learners (DLL) in the United States has tripled in the last several decades and now accounts for 25% of all children in the United States (Migration Policy Institute, June 2014). Many of these children are exposed to multiple languages in the home and the early childhood setting (ECE) setting, and the vast…

Children's hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4-11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were…

Herbert Read's "Education through Art" (henceforth ETA) is a pioneering attempt to provide empirical evidence for the need for art in the public school system. Rooting for art education, Read applies the conclusions of the newly evolving psychological research to his thesis on education, which he holds to be a contemporary revival of…

Cross-linguistic studies have shown that typically developing children have difficulties comprehending non-canonical structures. These findings have been interpreted within the Relativized Minimality (RM) approach, according to which local relations cannot be established between two terms of a dependency if an intervening element possesses similar…

Due to the predominance of boys diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), girls are rarely studied independently. Research specifically focusing on play and social-communication in girls with ASD is extremely varied. We were interested in whether girls with ASD demonstrated equivalent social-communication and play skills in early childhood…

Maternal smoking during pregnancy (SDP) has been linked to poorer offspring executive function across development, but SDP does not occur independent of other familial risk factors. As such, poor and inconsistent control for potential confounds, notably shared familial (i.e., genetic and environmental) confounds, preclude concluding causal effects…

The process of the language acquisition of children is reflected in two aspects; language structure and pragmatic functions. Data from "The Longtime Tracing Oral Corpus of Typical Development Children" (one child; 2,367 sentences) are analyzed. This study examines the child's sentence final particle (SFP) "ba", in which we…

Gender differences in reading development are a global phenomenon, with girls typically performing better than boys. Some studies have reported gender differences favouring girls in reading comprehension in South Africa, but little systematic evidence exists about gender differences in the cognitive-linguistic abilities that underlie reading…