Research Findings: This study assessed public perceptions of child care and its providers in a Canadian province where government funding for child care includes subsidies and a voluntary accreditation process. In 2007-2008, 1,443 randomly selected adults in Alberta, Canada, completed a telephone survey. Individuals were eligible to participate if…

Research findings: Language development subcontexts within 20 Head Start classrooms were studied by observing teachers' child-directed talk during free play, mealtime, and book reading. In each context, observers coded all child-directed statements, directives, and questions, noted instances of pretend talk and decontextualized talk, and rated the…

Research Findings: This article is based on the premise that the field of early childhood education needs to begin to study the details of teacher-child interaction if it is to understand fully what aspects of classrooms foster development and to create effective professional development interventions. To this end, we report analyses of four Head…

This study reports on an analysis of the relation between kindergarten children's developing theory of mind and their understanding of characters' actions and consciousness in story narrative, based on Bruner's (1986) notion of the dual landscapes of action and consciousness. Wordless picture books were used to model these two aspects of…