During the first year of life, infants possess some of the key social--cognitive abilities required for success in a social world: Infants interpret others' actions in terms of their intentions and can use this understanding prospectively to generate predictions about others' behavior. Exactly how these foundational abilities develop is currently…

The authors discuss an urban public school district's efforts to reinsert play after its mandated disappearance for fourteen years under a scripted curriculum imposed to meet the goals of the No Child Left Behind law. The authors analyze field notes, teacher and administrator interviews, coaching records, and surveys to chart the impact on…

"The Leading Edge of Early Childhood Education" aims to support the effort to simultaneously scale up and improve the quality of early childhood education by bringing together relevant insights from emerging research to provide guidance for this critical, fledgling field. It reflects the growing recognition that early childhood…

This Self-Study Guide has been developed to support Florida Voluntary Prekindergarten Providers (VPK) who are required to complete an improvement plan process (i.e., low-performing providers). The guide has sections that can be used during both the process of selecting target areas for an improvement plan and the process of implementing new or…

Schools seem firmly rooted in the emphasis on computational mastery, and seldom seem to have time to develop other areas of mathematical thinking, such as real-world problem solving and the application of mathematical concepts. All too often, children seem to do well in math in the early grades because they easily memorize the facts and the…

This article focuses on senses, emotions and cultural practices such as writing, reading and speaking in West Germany after 1945. The period immediately following the end of the Second World War--the so-called "Stunde Null", or "zero hour"--has generally been seen as a time of new beginnings, also with regard to cleansing the…

Detecting self-generated actions and imitating other-generated actions are important abilities in order to interact with others. The relationship between these domains was investigated in 6-8-month-old infants. In a contingency-preference task, infants observed their own legs on a real-time and a delayed video display. In an imitation task, the…

Whether discussing the process involved in positive youth development (PYD), articulating an approach (or philosophy) of youth programs associated with PYD, or enacting a program aimed at promoting PYD, ideas derived from relational developmental systems (RDS) metatheory are pertinent. Accordingly, we discuss the RDS metamodel and explain the…

The author reviews historical attempts--mostly by European thinkers--to characterize modernity and its relationship to play. He discusses ideas from Friederich Schiller to Brian Sutton-Smith, all to set the ground for a theory of play in the modern world. Emphasizing the ideas of Max Weber--in particular his theory of rationalization and its…

Learning in the earliest stage of life--the infancy, toddlerhood and preschool period--is relational and rapid. Child-initiated and adult-mediated conversations, playful interactions and learning through active involvement are integral to young children making sense of their environments and to their development over time. The child's experience…

What does it take to transform a large, bureaucratic institution with a fractured culture and a compliance orientation into a nurturing, collaborative, vision-directed organization? This report and the accompanying research brief endeavor to answer that question by examining a humanistic and systems thinking approach to cultural change that took…

Spatial categorization has a long history in the research of infant cognition and perception. Many conclusions are drawn from the approach wherein infants are habituated to examples of a spatial category X and then display an attention recovery (i.e., dishabituation) to a contrasting category Y. However, the distinction infants make between X and…

Two experiments investigated how preschoolers judge whether learning has occurred. Experiment 1 showed that 3- and 4-year-olds used an individual's ability to demonstrate knowledge to judge whether he/she had learned something, regardless of that individual's claim about whether he/she had learned. Experiment 2 considered whether children…

Given the centrality of both parent-child attachment and emotion regulation in children's development and adjustment, it is important to evaluate the relations between these constructs. This article discusses conceptual and empirical links between attachment and emotion regulation in middle childhood, highlights progress and challenges in the…

In this brief essay, I comment on the constellation of papers published in the current issue. I argue that it represents the new beginning of the new era for the journal, driven by several considerations. Among these, three are key. First, the collection of articles in this issue is explicitly concerned with the multivariate and multidisciplinary…