Neuroscientists have long believed that there are sensitive periods in development during which the effects of experience play a critical role. And developmental psychologists have argued for the importance of early experience in the first years of life as being critical for brain and behavioral development. Most of the neuroscience research…

Evidence points to associations between the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods and children's and adolescents' development. A minimal amount of research, however, examines how timing of exposure to neighborhood socioeconomic conditions matters. This study used longitudinal data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development…

Pakistan is a developing country with the second highest infant and child mortality rates in South Asia. During the past years this region has undergone several humanitarian emergencies that have negatively affected all the aspects of health and development of young children. During these emergencies relief camps are set up by governmental and…

Many tests provide users with several different types of scores to facilitate interpretation and description of students' performance. Common examples include raw scores, age- and grade-equivalent scores, and standard scores. However, when used within the context of assessing growth among young children, these scores should not be interchangeable…

In a rural Alabama school district, 38.46% of the students failed the reading portion of the high school graduation examination. While the teachers in the school district were trained to differentiate instruction according to ability and gender, the impact of gender-differentiated reading instruction was unknown. The purpose of this case study was…

This study examined associations between parent-child interactions and the development of social skills in 42 children (21 typically developing and 21 with autism spectrum disorders) between the ages of 3 years, 0 months and 6 years, 11 months. We expected that positive parent-child interaction qualities would be related to children's social…

Use of multivariate analysis (e.g., multivariate analysis of variance) is common when normally distributed outcomes are collected in intervention research. However, when mixed responses--a set of normal and binary outcomes--are collected, standard multivariate analyses are no longer suitable. While mixed responses are often obtained in…

As young children enter formal schooling, they are at various points along their individual developmental paths toward literacy. Generally, their egocentric speech is becoming more social and they are building their capacity for logical thought and concrete problem-solving. This is a gradual development and teachers can support children's literacy…

In this article, we report on a study in which we interviewed working class families who were the first cohort in a family literacy program that had been locally developed and implemented in a small village in Canada more than two decades previously in response to community-identified needs. The study was framed by Tulving's concept of episodic…

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of research on extended education in Switzerland and to point out the gaps in the field. In Switzerland official education statistics and research on extended education are still in their infancy. This is directly associated with the fact that extended education has only been widely discussed…

Multitalker situations confront listeners with a plethora of competing auditory inputs, and hence require selective attention to relevant information, especially when the perceptual saliency of distracting inputs is high. This study augmented the classical forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm by adding an interaural intensity manipulation…

This study examined the developmental trajectories of executive function (EF) of children and adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Han Chinese. Five hundred and fifteen children and adolescents with ADHD and 249 healthy controls took part in this study. All of them were administered four EF tests capturing…

The motivation for this study was to explore a conceptual framework to understand the outcomes and processes of motor performance in children. Vertical jumping, a fundamental movement skill, was used to compare children (ages 6-12 years) who were typically developing (TD) and those identified as having low motor proficiency (LMP). Jumps were…

This longitudinal study examined developmental links between closeness in teacher-child relationships and children's receptive language ability from the end of the preschool years into the early elementary years, while controlling for changes in peer interaction quality and child behavioral functioning. The sample included children and their…

While all children have a right to quality care and education in their early years, how to secure that right, especially in resource-limited contexts, is the subject of much debate. For some nations, private schools can seem like a good option, requiring few federal resources. However, the privatization of early education presents significant…