Access to playful experiences outdoors is critical for children's learning and development. With a significant amount of young children attending early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings (OECD, OECD Publishing, 2023), these programs have an important role in furthering children's equitable access to outdoor play. As part of a larger…

Learning takes time: Performance usually starts poorly and improves with practice. Do children intuit this basic phenomenon of skill learning? In preregistered Experiment 1 (n = 125; 54% female; 48% White; collected 2022-2023), US 7- to 8-year-old children predicted improved performance, 5- to 6-year-old children predicted flat performance, and…

Caregivers play an outsized role in shaping early life experiences and development, but we often lack mechanistic insight into "how" exactly caregiver behavior scaffolds the neurodevelopment of specific learning processes. Here, we capitalized on the fact that caregivers differ in how predictable their behavior is to ask if infants'…

This theoretical article examines the crucial role of play-based learning (PBL) in enhancing the mathematical skills of children in the Early Childhood Phase, referred to as Foundation Phase (Grade R-3) learners, within a South African context. The article argues that the traditional approach to teaching early childhood mathematics, where teachers…

Purpose: This paper describes oral language as a multi-faceted and unconstrained phenomenon, including its social purpose in societies and the implications of this for education. It provides a critique of the concepts of oral language which have come to dominate literacy and language education policy across the Organisation of Economic…

The present study sought to determine how and where pedagogical decisions are made, as well as how such pedagogical decisions construct pedagogy, in the early childhood education context. The data was collected through interviews conducted with 46 early childhood education professionals, both teachers and practical nurses. The questions focused on…

This study aims to compare the effects of "questioning with minimal evaluation" (PE) and "prompt-evaluate-expand-repeat" (PEER) used in dialogic reading (DR) on children's language development. This study included 119 typically developing (TD) and 107 Chinese children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by using a pre- and…