Children spend as much as ten hours per day, five days a week in childcare centers and preschools. In providing healthy environments, these facilities deal with a variety of pest and pesticide issues influenced by their geographic location, local environment, and pesticide regulations. Some rely extensively on pesticides while others use…

This article addresses how to design developmental games that connect knowledge about motor development with motor learning. As evidenced in the SHAPE America National Standards and Grade-level Outcomes for K-12 Physical Education, understanding children's phases and stages of motor development is essential to designing developmentally appropriate…

This paper examines the benefits of incorporating ecotourism programs into the adult education curriculum. Social education and lifelong learning ("shougai gakushuu") are terms used to refer to adult education and related activities in Japan. Adult education originated immediately after Second World War with the enactment of the…

Character education specialists seem to know it when they see it, but what it means to call something a character education program remains unclear. One possible source for this uncertainty is the manner in which character education has been defined. By identifying certain features as necessary, existing definitions fail to encompass the universe…

Robert McGrath's article has the great virtue of asking an important question: "What is character education?" He argues that currently "what it means to call something a character education program remains unclear." Without a clear definition, McGrath says, one cannot differentiate character education from other programs…

Leaders in education are often the sole person in their particular role in a school, and have thus frequently struggled with professional isolation. In recent years, social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter have created new opportunities for educators, including instructional leaders, to expand their professional learning networks (PLN) to…

Two studies are presented to examine whether and why 3-5-year-olds in Pakistan display limited social understanding. Study 1 tested 71 preschoolers on Lillard and Flavell's (1992) test of desires, pretence and beliefs, plus two false belief tasks, and showed very limited understanding across these measures even though almost half were over 5 years…

The provision of Integrated Early Childhood Development (IECD) positively impacts children's futures physically, cognitively, emotionally and socially. The assessment sought to inform intervention programs to improve the status of children's physical, social-emotional, cognitive and educational needs, as well as their health and nutritional needs.…

The thinking required by higher education student engagement in research processes may segue into the development of students' work skills, enabling them to professionally transition to the workforce. However, although this transition may be facilitated before and during Work Integrated Learning [WIL] experiences, there is typically a gulf between…

Program design is a challenging task that requires significant effort and resources. When a proposed program is being designed for both face-to-face and online delivery, the challenges are compounded. If done right, this task offers an opportunity to leverage pedagogical theory and principles in designing a curriculum for the program. Our research…

As information technology infrastructure becomes strategic to organizations, the author examines business-school programs that educate future infrastructure analysts. Information systems (IS) 2010 and information technology (IT) 2008 curriculum models are used to survey courses required by telecommunications and IT infrastructure programs in…

Chinese kindergartens' over 110 years of adaptation of foreign models is a vivid example of how globalization comes into direct contact with Chinese culture and creates cultural hybridities. Learning Stories as a narrative assessment tool to children's development from New Zealand, has swept China with the endorsement from the professional…

Many teachers and administrators recognize the importance of social and emotional development for student success but do not feel that they have the time or tools to support social and emotional learning (SEL). The American Institutes for Research developed the "Social and Emotional Learning Coaching Toolkit: Keeping SEL at the Center"…

This study examined associations between caregiver talk and language skills in full term (FT) and preterm (PT) children (n = 97). All-day recordings of caregiver-child interactions revealed striking similarities in amount of caregiver talk heard by FT and PT children. Children who heard more caregiver talk at 16 months demonstrated better…

Older interlocutors are more likely than younger ones to make pragmatic inferences, that is, inferences that go beyond the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence. Here we ask whether pragmatic development is associated with increased activity in brain structures associated with inference-making or in those associated with Theory of Mind. We…