Children's learning and cognitive development have a distinct receptivity to the circumstances of childhood. However, not all children have equal opportunities and learning inequities continue to be influenced by the social and economic circumstances of childhood. Examining factors within the environments that children are growing up in, and the…

Research Findings: The home literacy environment and particularly shared reading are central determinants of children's emergent literacy skills and predictors of their later reading development. Although the importance of frequent shared reading is well established, there is little knowledge about the age at which reading to children starts…

Over the last 20 years, we have learned much about the extent to which early-life deprivation affects the mental health of children and adolescents. This body of evidence comes predominantly from studies of children raised in institutional care. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) is the only randomized controlled trial designed to…

The Sustainable Development Goals mandate that by 2030, all children should have access to quality early child development opportunities, healthcare and pre-primary education. Yet validated measures of ECD in low and middle income countries (LMICs) are rare. To address this gap, a Systematic Review (SR) of measures available to profile the…

Hart and Risley's (1995) concept of a "word gap" (aka "language gap") is widely used to describe inferior cognitive development and lower academic achievement as by-products of the language patterns of families from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In recent decades, this line of deficit research has proliferated and…

A brief review is provided of recent research on the impact of early visual language exposure on a variety of developmental outcomes, including literacy, cognition, and social adjustment. This body of work points to the great importance of giving young deaf children early exposure to a visual language as a critical precursor to the acquisition of…

This evidence review synthesises the best available international evidence regarding approaches to behaviour in schools to: (1) Produce an overarching model or framework explaining why school pupils may misbehave (Review 1); (2) Review the effectiveness of classroom-based approaches to behaviour trialled in robust research studies (Review 2); and…

Youth homelessness is a growing concern in the United States. Despite difficulties studying this population due to inconsistent definitions of what it means to be a youth and homeless, the current body of research indicates that abuse, family breakdown, and disruptive family relationships are common contributing factors to youth homelessness.…

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is a lifelong condition that significantly affects the individual's learning, development, behavior, family, and quality of life. Diagnosing children with this condition and providing effective supports is challenging for professionals because little intervention research has been performed with the…

Identifying mechanisms that explain the children's differential vulnerability to violence exposure is an important research focus. Developmentally sensitive theories and methods are recommended to better understand children's risk and resilience to violence exposure. Examples are provided of promising research that links violence exposure to…

This article uses longitudinal data from approximately 2,000 low-income families participating in the national evaluation of the Comprehensive Child Development Program to examine the associations between preschool children's living arrangements and their cognitive achievement and emotional adjustment. The analysis distinguishes families in which…

Researchers from several disciplines have contributed to the realization that context or social situation varies in regard to a child's language acquisition. Children acquire both linguistic competence, the unconscious understanding of grammatical rules, and communicative competence, the understanding that language is used differently in different…

Reviews and integrates research on the short-term and long-term impact of different forms of child maltreatment. Notes that scant studies concerning physical and motor development suggest psychobiological consequences of abuse; studies on social and emotional development indicate significant impact of abuse; and studies of cognitive/academic…

Key components of human behavioral genetics and Sandra Scarr's work of the past two decades are critically reviewed based on scholarship in animal neuropsychology and clinical and educational psychology. Scarr's opinion that interventions to enhance intellectual development are ineffectual for children from abuse- and neglect-free backgrounds is…

Takes the position, contrary to that of Sandra Scarr, that the details of socialization patterns are crucial to an understanding of normal and deviant development. Research is cited to support the argument that better than adequate parenting optimizes the development of both normal and vulnerable children and that parents' belief in their own…