This critical review aims to question whether or not the enthusiasm around early childhood care and education (ECCE) programmes is producing premature models, ill-adapted to West African socio-cultural contexts. Reviewing research that investigates the impact of ECCE on cognitive development and school readiness, we first focus on the universal…

Guidelines for teaching California's students have changed dramatically in recent years, as state leaders have adopted new academic standards, curriculum frameworks, and instructional materials lists in an attempt to better prepare students for college and career. However, adopting high-quality standards and curriculum materials does not guarantee…

This article describes the practical application of an innovative bilingual preschool program that involves two-way immersion of both English and Chinese in classrooms. This has not been written about extensively, especially in the context of early childhood classrooms in Asian countries. The primary goal of the two-way immersion kindergarten is…

After decades of conflict with Indonesia, Timor-Leste is gradually rebuilding its education infrastructure and reclaiming its identity as an independent country. In the first decade post-independence the education sector faced many challenges, including a lack of school buildings and resources, the need to replenish and upskill the Timorese…

Brazilian initiatives aimed at the insertion of information and communication technologies (ICT) in K-12 education took their first steps in the 1970s, when several countries focused their efforts on the use of ICT in the educational context. Since the early 1980s, a number of public policies have been created that have given rise to various…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore and describe the visual arts beliefs and practices of eight K-1 teachers in four schools and in two different school districts in a southern state. Using a phenomenological framework (Creswell, 2007; Leedy & Ormrod, 2005), the research revealed the teachers' understandings of beliefs and how…

Given the vital importance of using a scientific approach for curriculum development, the authors employed a design experiment methodology (Brown, 1992; Shavelson et al., 2003) to develop and evaluate, FUSION, a first grade mathematics intervention intended for students with or at-risk for mathematics disabilities. FUSION, funded through IES…

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the analysis of the Early Childhood Education (ECE) curriculum in six countries involved in the UPDATE-project, and on that basis, propose a conceptual foundation for technology education in ECE that aims to enhance gender sensitive technology education in the continuum from early years to…

The Early Excellence centre was established in 1999 to undertake early years curriculum development in the North West, Yorkshire and Humberside regions. As part of development work, small research projects are commissioned in early years settings. This article describes how the authors worked with Wingate Community Nursery School. The work was…

The increasing emphasis on accountability in early care and education has created an opportunity for programs to revisit their child assessment practices. This article presents a model for using authentic assessment practices to document children's progress toward a set of program standards, specifically the Head Start Child Outcomes Framework, as…

In this article we consider the development of key policy issues in England, related to the area of literacy learning and children who are considered to have difficulties in literacy in their early years. We trace the tensions which have arisen since the 1980s between different policies and practices in these areas. These tensions include…

The overarching aim of this research in the proposal was the following: In a number of early childhood centres and early years school classrooms that have already begun to explore in this area, to investigate effective pedagogy designed to develop five learning competencies over time. This project was developed in response to curriculum reform in…