Growing international interest in the early childhood years has been accompanied by an expansion of public programs in Australia targeting young children and their families. This article explores some of the influences and rhetoric that frame these initiatives. It encourages critical examination of the discourses that shape the nature of early…

Constructivist physical education emphasizes cognitive engagement. This study examined the impact of a constructivist curriculum on in-class physical activity. Caloric expenditure in metabolic equivalents (MET) and vector magnitude count (VM) data from a random sample of 41 constructivist lessons were compared with those from a random sample of 35…

The Executive Committee at "ZERO TO THREE" created a Task Force on Culture and Development to deepen our understanding of the role of culture in child development and to guide the organization through a self-assessment process to better understand how staff and board members address the issue of culture in their work. The task force's literature…

The purpose of this study was to explore students' technology use and its relationship with their psychosocial development. Previous research explored students' computer use in conjunction with their cognitive development. This study examined the effects of computer use and other technologies, such as instant messaging, handheld gaming devices,…

"Childhood Programs and Practices in the First Decade of Life" presents research findings on the effects of early childhood programs and practices in the first decade of life and their implications for policy development and reform. Leading scholars in the multidisciplinary field of human development and in early childhood learning…

Access to education is recognized as a basic human right and yet projections based on current trends show that more than 50 countries will not achieve universal primary education by 2015. This briefing paper looks at the role of malnutrition and diseases in the failure of countries to meet EFA targets. It is based on the CREATE Pathways to Access…

The article reviews developmental research among Palestinians living in Gaza. The aims are, first, to analyze how exposure to traumatic events associates with children's mental health and their cognitive, emotional and social development. Second, we aimed to model familial and symbolic processes that can either harm or protect the mental health of…

The educational problem that this paper addresses is how to summarize the constructivist framework reflected in student-centered learning approaches, in a way that provides educators with manageable guidelines for transforming classrooms into computer-supported learning environments. Fourteen values that summarize the constructivist framework are…

This paper argues that in a postmodern perspective, any curriculum is an expression of epistemology. It is a way of knowing, and a culturally oriented language. As such, curriculum is a manifestation of human consciousness, and it should comprehend in its scope the varieties of languages expressing races, genders, and social classes. Within a…

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…

This essay emphasizes a need for broad-minded constructivism which posits that individuals have coherent ways of understanding their world and that these understandings are structured and hierarchically organized. The meaning behind the term "co-construction," used in psychology, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines, 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…

This study examined the electrophysiological differences between baseline EEG frequencies and EEG frequencies obtained while listening to music stimuli. The experimental group comprised 22 children, ages 4 to 6 years old, who received special music instruction twice a week for 25 minutes for 7 weeks. The control group received no music…

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…