As schools become living sites of evidence-based practice, teachers increasingly accumulate large quantities of observations and records. In these times of an overabundance of documentation, there is a need to find the "unit of analysis" that determines the essence of what matters for assessment. In drawing upon cultural-historical…

Using vignettes and interviews, this study examined understanding and awareness of autism, and (a)typical development more broadly, among 32 Somali parents living in the United Kingdom. Results demonstrated that parents of both autistic (n = 16) and non-autistic (n = 16) children were just as likely to identify vignettes of typically developing…

Using a holistic support framework, this study investigated teachers' conceptions of effective play-based learning development and how their perceptions of its effectiveness related to whole-child development. Data were collected from a mixed method study. A total of 286 questionnaires from 50 Hong Kong kindergartens were collected and then 29…

Planning plays an important role in the production of written texts. Little is known about why children plan and the plans they create when they are not explicitly instructed. This study explores the plans that elementary school children in Years 1, 3, and 5 create before writing a text. We compared performance of children educated in Catalan and…

The present study examined associations between parents' child-based worth, psychological control, parent-child relationship, and young children's behavioral problems in terms of internalizing and externalizing problems. A sample of Chinese parents (N = 285) of children aged 30-83 (M = 57.52, SD = 13.47) months completed questionnaires to report…

Public preschool programs require the use of a research-based, whole-child curriculum, yet limited research examines whether curricula influence classroom experiences and children's development. We use five samples of preschool children to examine differences in classroom processes and children's school readiness by classroom curricular status…

The association between academic self-concept and achievement is assumed to be reciprocal. Typically, the association is analyzed by variants of the classical cross-lagged panel model. Results with more recently developed methodological approaches, for example, the random intercept cross-lagged panel model, its continuous-time implementation, and…

Excursions (field trips) can provide new and exciting learning opportunities outside schools and early childhood education (ECE) centres, adding new dimensions to an education programme. This article presents the findings from two doctoral studies by Terreni (2017) and Ryder (2019). Terreni, as part of a mixed-method approach, undertook a…

There have been significant recent developments in the policy arena in South Africa in respect of disability and of early childhood development viz. the "White Paper on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the National Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy." Using Bacchi's analytical framework encapsulated in the question,…

The term 'Third Culture Kid' (TCK) is commonly used to denote children living in a host culture other than their passport culture during their developmental years. However, its meaning in relation to other terminology referring to a similar concept is a source of interest for many stakeholders. This paper opens up opportunities for further…

Guided looking, even done informally, has a huge impact on early childhood preparation for elementary school and is an effective way to address learning inequities. Why, therefore, does it play such a small role in schooling'? This is a question that occupied Philip Yenawine during his long career working in art museums, where the adults, once…

Theoretical and empirical research is challenging long-held assumptions about how culture shapes children's thinking, emotions, and actions. No longer is 'culture' thought to be a family-based characteristic that operates upon children's development in predictable ways. Instead, culture is considered inseparable from the developmental process, in…

The current early years emphasis on ensuring young children achieve 'school readiness' has contributed to a context of academic pressure in early years settings in England. The debated term 'school readiness' is vaguely expressed in England's early years curriculum as 'Children reaching a good level of development in the prime areas of literacy…

Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in…

Family involvement, an important element of effective early childhood education programs, is crucial for children's learning processes and development. With family involvement, while families have the opportunity of participating and contributing to their children's development and learning processes schools gain unique information about…