"Research Findings:" Early science skills predict later science achievement, and persistent achievement gaps in science appear as early as preschool. The current study compared the effectiveness of different instructional approaches for teaching preschoolers about sinking and floating and examined individual differences in learning.…

Research Findings: Few studies address the contextual conditions for preschool staff in supporting children in preschool, especially in classrooms with high proportions of early second language learners (L2-learners). The aim of the study was to describe preschool staff's support of children's engagement in units with high proportions of…

Research Findings: The Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management (IY-TCM) program is an evidence-based intervention intended to promote the social and emotional skills of children and to reduce the frequency of inappropriate types of behavior. This paper reports on its initial implementation in Portugal. The primary aim of this study is to…

Today, digital games are considered important tools for learning, but using them in early childhood education and care (ECEC) has raised the question of educators' roles when children play an educational digital game. The aim of this study was to explore how ECEC educators differed in their attitudes and perceptions toward and ways of supporting…

Research Findings: Grounded on personification storytelling, this intervention study introduced a science program including extensive astronomy concepts to 24 children (4-5 years). The storytelling attributes personal characteristics to cosmic bodies with metaphors relating to children's lives in explaining the scientific concepts, for example,…

Research Findings: This study explores how Chinese preschool teachers' enactment of Concept Development (CD) strategies, as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), might effectively elicit children's higher-order thinking during whole-group science teaching. Participants included 25 Chinese preschool teachers and 800 young…

This study investigated whether two educational strategies, providing material and active adult support during play, promote pretend play quality in a group of preschoolers. The sample consisted of 101 preschoolers (50% females; mean age at t1= 43.02 months, SD= 5.94) from 14 Swiss educational play groups. These were randomly allocated to the…

Research Findings: This study examined associations between observed emotion-focused teaching practices and preschool children's emotion expression, emotion-related behaviors, and learning behaviors. Four centers located in large midwestern and mid-Atlantic metropolitan areas participated in the study. Of these, one center was a Head Start…

Although writing is a critical foundational skill and teachers' approaches to writing is connected to development, writing instruction in preschool is often limited, infrequent, and narrow. While research has investigated literacy environments of preschool classrooms, often with a focus on reading, less is known about writing environments. Thus,…

Research Findings: This study examines the amount of attention to print paid by Taiwanese mothers and children during joint book reading over time and the relationship between the use of print referencing by Taiwanese mothers and the print concepts skills of their children measured at age 3;0. A total of 42 Taiwanese mother-child pairs from…

Research Findings: This study provides a framework for categorizing one subset of the large and heterogeneous group of home-based child care providers, unlisted paid providers. We analyzed data on unlisted paid home-based child care providers (n = 448) from the 2012 National Survey of Early Care and Education conducted in the United States. We…

Research Findings: Anthropomorphism--the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman entities--has long been a staple of children's media. However, children's experiences with anthropomorphic media may interfere with biological reasoning instead encouraging an anthropocentric view of the natural world. To date, little research has addressed…

Research Findings: This study investigated teachers' Concept development (CD) strategy use in whole-group math teaching and its associations with children's higher-order thinking processes in 25 Chinese preschool math lessons. We utilized the CD dimension within the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) to guide our exploration. CD…

Research Findings: Children's oral language skills lay the foundation for later literacy and can be fostered through responsive conversations with teachers. However, such conversations are rare in preschool, particularly between teachers and dual language learners (DLLs), or students who speak a minoritized language at home. DLLs benefit when…

Research findings: This study examined cross-cultural differences in the structure of preschoolers' narratives, cross-cultural differences in maternal elaboration during reminiscing and the links between the two. We report evidence from middle-class, monolingual samples from Costa Rica and the United States. Results revealed that U.S. children…