The historiography of child guidance has focused primarily on the United States, where it first developed before travelling across the English-speaking world. The rapid expansion of child guidance in the interwar years was enabled by private philanthropy, which provided fellowships to foreign professionals to study in the United States. This…

What is the practical pedagogic value of the zone of proximal development? How might we draw from the writings of Vygotsky and Leont'ev with regard to understanding the process of children and young people's development as socialised intellectual beings? This article applies cultural-historical theory to classroom activity in order to reveal the…

This paper explores the trend, between 1905 and the late 1920s in UK and US child psychology, of "discovering," labelling and calculating different "ages" in children. Those new "ages"--from mental to emotional, social, anatomical ages, and more--were understood as either replacing, or meaningfully related to,…

A core component of applied educational and child psychology practice is the skilfulness with which practitioners are able to rigorously structure and conceptualise complex real world human problems. This is done in such a way that when they (with others) jointly work on them, there is an increased likelihood of positive outcomes being achieved…

Against a background of increasing student eligibility for "access arrangements" in examinations for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), this article examines the processes within schools that structure a student's access to the provision of reading support, including staff and student viewpoints. Dominic Griffiths,…

Service supervision has become a central feature of the training of child psychotherapists in the UK. This paper reports on the work of a research workshop set up to explore the task and its complexities. The paper draws on several years of monthly meetings of a highly experienced group of supervisors. It discusses the methodology for studying…

A qualitative psychoanalytic clinical research project using a post-Kleinian contemporary approach was undertaken by a team of seven qualified and experienced child psychotherapists working in community Tier 3 Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). A number of referred young people who deliberately harmed themselves or attempted…

Susan Sutherland Isaacs (1885-1948) was arguably the most influential child psychologist and educator of her British generation. Her work was studied by eminent contemporary academics, psychologists, philosophers and politicians. Her influence was international. She reached across the world to a generation of teacher educators who passed on her…

In this article the concept of spirituality, especially with relation to school age children and young people, is discussed. Some of the possibilities and constraints present in this area are noted, especially the unease with which many researchers and practitioners view such a difficult to define topic and also its traditional association with…

How should applied psychology practitioners be prepared to meet an increasingly challenging and unpredictable working context? This article explores some of the key current issues for educational and child psychology practitioners and their professional trainers in the UK with regard to the topic of effective consultation. The article argues that…

In this article, Tina Axup, an educational psychologist working in Southend-on-Sea, and Irvine Gersch, director of educational and child psychology programmes at the University of East London, describe a small-scale study of teachers' attitudes regarding the impact of student behaviour on their professional lives. Anecdotal evidence within a local…

The aim of this study was to examine whether there was variation in levels of psychological adjustment among children conceived through Assisted Reproductive Technologies using the parents' gametes (homologous), sperm donation, egg donation, embryo donation and surrogacy. Information was provided by parents about the psychological functioning of…

The psychology of Alfred Adler is traditionally considered to be one of the three so-called in-depth or psychoanalytic therapies, the other two being the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. This article demonstrates that Adler's Individual Psychology was especially influential on teachers in Vienna between the two world wars. There…

This study investigated associations between working memory (measured by complex memory tasks) and both reading and mathematics abilities, as well as the possible mediating factors of fluid intelligence, verbal abilities, short-term memory (STM), and phonological awareness, in a sample of 46 6- to 11-year-olds with reading disabilities. As a…

The contributions of counterfactual conditional reasoning (CCR), belief understanding, and inferential reasoning to the performance of children with autism (CWA) on standard false belief tasks were investigated. To assess the roles of these three factors, we compared the performance of CWA on physical-state CCR tasks (which do not require either…