We examined how parent math attitudes and practices relate to emergent math skills in 72 preschoolers from low-income households. Specifically, we investigated parents' views about the importance of math learning, their confidence in teaching math, their perceptions of child interest in math, and their time spent engaging their child in math…

Critical thinking is essential for young children and can be enhanced through appropriate and supportive curricula. With the rich affordance of digitalization, this study evaluated the effects of a hybrid STEM curriculum on critical thinking skills in 74 kindergarteners (42 boys and 32 girls) aged 5.83-7.25 years (Mean = 6.44, SD = 0.31) from a…

This study investigated relations between parent teaching, cumulative instability/chaos and school readiness in a group of 130 children attending a Head Start preschool. Cumulative instability/chaos negatively predicted fall school readiness as well as spring school readiness. Parent teaching did not predict fall school readiness but did predict…

Parents play a key role in supporting young children's interactions with tablets (e.g. iPads). Little is known about the types of scaffolding parents provide during tablet activities and how these relate to child age, SES, and home use. Fifty-five parent-child dyads (M child age = 3.49 years) were videoed as they played on an iPad. All parent…

A Critical Discourse Analysis was used to examine the parents' social practice during shared storybook reading with young children (birth to eight-years-old). The methodology involved two phases: (1) educational databases were searched and (2) a template was developed and used to code the programmes' components and studies' research design.…

Parents engage in joint story book sharing where adults read an appropriate text to children, usually in the home environment. Story book sharing promotes the young children's development of receptive and expressive language abilities as well as their emerging early literacy abilities, which have an effect on the children's success in school-based…

The present study examined parental guidance of young children's inquiry during joint interactions in the home environment. Half of the parents received inquiry-based guidance instructions, encouraging their children to observe, question, predict, and evaluate; the control group received no information about guidance. Thirty-two families were…

Globally, governments as well as international and donor organizations are increasingly emphasizing the need for investment in effective early childhood programmes that can provide an equitable start for all children. Research is scant, however, on the effectiveness of different interventions supporting early language as well as broader school…

The objective of this study is to examine the structural relationships among variables that predict the mathematical ability of young children, namely young children's mathematical attitude, exposure to private mathematical learning, mothers' view about their children's mathematical learning, and mothers' mathematical attitude. To this end, we…

Parent guidance for numeracy activities and preschoolers' numeracy performance were examined in the context of playing a board game in three sessions over a two-week period. Twenty-eight parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to a numeracy awareness group in which parents were provided with suggested numeracy activities to incorporate into the…

A pragmatic randomised controlled trial was used to investigate the effects of two forms of shared reading on children's language and literacy skills. Parents of 80 children in the preparatory year of school participated in an eight-week home reading intervention. Families were assigned to one of three groups: dialogic reading (DR), dialogic…

In this study we investigated the frequency and types of questions asked when parents read with their four-year-old children, the relationship between the frequency and types of questions parents and children asked, and the relationship between these and the children's early literacy knowledge. Forty dyads shared two narrative texts and two…

The study reported in this paper explores parents' musical practices with children under the age of five in the home environment. A survey was sent to parents in three preschools, asking about parental music background, young children's involvement in music programmes, types of music children were exposed to in the home and frequency of musical…

Interviews with 15 mothers were analyzed to investigate how these mothers, who chose to delay their child's kindergarten entry, organized their children's environments during the hold-out year. Previous analyses of the interviews identified two categories of mothers, who were substantially different in their decision-making. In the current paper…

A family literacy program was examined to document the literacy experiences of 25 fathers and their five-year-old children. Using a case study methodology, this study examined the effects of a literacy intervention program that was designed to assist fathers to promote their children's acquisition of literacy. The results indicated that the…