Appropriate assessment practices are recognized as a critical part of the learning process and represent a key component of quality physical education. Recent shifts in school reform efforts toward more accountability in the United States and an emerging emphasis on student-centered approaches challenge historical approaches to assessment.…

This article presents the results of a systematic review of methods that have been used to measure or assess metacognition in children aged 4-16 years over a 20-year period (1992-2012). It includes an overview of the types of tool and methods used linked with the ages of the participants targeted and how metacognition and associated concepts are…

Although there is evidence that young children's inhibitory control (IC) is related to their academic skills, the nature of this relation and the role of potential moderators of it are not well understood. In this meta-analytic study, we summarized results from 75 peer-reviewed studies of preschool and kindergarten children (14,424 children; 32-80…

This review presents a novel framework for evaluating evidence based on a set of parallel criteria that can be applied to both group and single-subject experimental design (SSED) studies. The authors illustrate use of this evaluation system in a systematic review of 67 articles investigating social skills interventions for preschoolers with autism…

A primary purpose of early childhood education and interventions is to promote children's acquisition of knowledge and skills linked to later social competence and academic success. In this report, special attention is given to summarizing what has been learned about early childhood classrooms as contexts for development and learning, the kinds of…

This invited special issue of "Early Education and Development" presents research related to the Early Development Instrument (EDI; Janus & Offord, 2007), a community tool to assess children's school readiness at a population level. In this editorial introduction, we first sketch out recent trends in school readiness research that call for a…