"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Education and Care" delves into the dynamic landscape of early childhood education and critically addresses the intersection of theory and practice, offering a range of theoretical frameworks and practical strategies to support the holistic development of children. It explores a diverse array of…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) -- the phase before primary education -- is increasingly acknowledged as providing the foundations for lifelong learning and development. This second edition of 'Key data on early childhood education and care in Europe' charts the progress made in the key quality areas identified in the Council…

In this paper we discuss several key challenges encountered when conducting a study of the continuity of participation in the child care subsidy program. While many of these issues are familiar to those who have studied participation dynamics in other assistance programs, and to those familiar with survival analysis, we describe these challenges…

This paper describes the Revised Arena Format (RAF) and recommends its use in conducting multidisciplinary evaluations of young children suspected of developmental delays. The RAF appears to offer significant advantages in terms of behavior management, timeliness, and thoroughness. (Author/JDD)

Types of utterances (with locative action utterances specifically differentiated) were evaluated in a language-impaired child tracked between one year, six months and three years of age. Comparison with utterances in other children suggests the importance of such a fine-grained analysis in detecting semantic properties of child language…

This compendium, a deliverable for "Assessments for Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning with Preschool/Elementary-School Children," focuses on tools to assess the social and emotional learning (SEL) of preschool and elementary school students (i.e., five- to ten-year-olds), along with aspects of the contexts in which they learn and…

To assess changes in visual-motor function with age, 20 visually impaired infants and toddlers were followed, longitudinally, with the Bayley Mental Scale of Infant Development (BMSID). The BMSID was seen to be an appropriate tool for evaluating such children and especially effective as part of a longitudinal process. (Author/DB)

This study compared three methods for identifying non-mainstream dialect use: listener judgment ratings, type-based counts of non-mainstream pattern use, token- based counts. Correct dialect classifications were made for 88 to 97 percent of participants, although regression algorithms had to be applied to the type- and token-based results. For…

The Infant Monitoring Project is designed to identify infants in need of further evaluation, by having parents complete a set of questionnaires about their infant's development at four-six month intervals. Evaluation of the questionnaires has shown that they are low-cost and have substantial agreement with standardized assessments. (Author/JDD)

This longitudinal study examined the effectiveness of two different assessment methodologies, low structured observation and structured elicitation tasks, to obtain communicative intents from 35 normal children at the sensorimotor stage of development (9-24 months). The two approaches appeared to vary depending on the age of the child and the…

The Psychoeducational Profile was translated into Chinese, adapted, and administered to 23 autistic children and 40 children with normal development, ages 3-7, in Hong Kong. The scale was found to have criterion-related validity, discriminant validity, and properties of a developmental scale. (Author/JDD)

Interactions between 25 mothers and their developmentally delayed children (ages 2-5) during 15 minutes of semi-structured free play were coded independently with a global rating scale and a behavior count coding scheme. Correlational analyses were performed around three central themes: (1) the nature of the relationship between maternal…

Developmental Record protocols were obtained from archival files for 1,069 institutionalized mentally retarded adults and children. Analyses revealed high internal reliabilities, but questionable validity. The Developmental Record did not adequately discriminate the five areas of functioning it purportedly assesses (self-care, perceptual-motor,…

This two-part study began with a replication, statistical validation, and extension of the Karmiloff-Smith and Inhelder study of children's construction of theories about balance. The 128 subjects (ages 4 to 6) were videotaped as they tried to balance blocks on a fulcrum. A scale was developed to assess the degree to which the child's performance…

Professional review teams in nine Third World countries assessed a sample of children referred as probable cases (or as controls) from a door to door household survey of 1000+ children aged 3 to 9 years. Examines the criteria used by the teams in determining whether or not the children should be classified as severely mentally handicapped. (RWB)