Research Findings: Early childhood educators play an important role in promoting children's social emotional learning (SEL). This study proposes a comprehensive coding scheme to explore teachers' strategies and children's responses in shared book reading (SBR), which create opportunities to share pictures and storylines to examine social…

Research Findings: Teachers and parents often use trade books to introduce or reinforce mathematics concepts. To date, an analysis of the early numeracy content of trade books has not been conducted. Consequently, this study evaluated the properties of numbers and counting within trade books. We coded 160 trade books targeted at establishing early…

Research Findings: Research has demonstrated the developmental and educational benefits of play. Despite these benefits, teacher-directed academic instruction is prominent in kindergarten. There is increasing acknowledgment in curricula and policies of the challenges presented by a lack of play in classrooms and the need to support academic…

Outcomes of studies with exclusively or predominantly female caregivers suggest that boys in child care are involved with interactions, attachment relationships, and care of lower quality than girls. We investigated to what extent child gender (N = 38, 19 boys) and caregiver gender (N = 38, 19 males) is associated with child-caregiver interactions…

Research Findings: Digital play is now commonplace in many young children's lives, but not in preschool settings. This situation is likely due to the fact that the existent literature seldom highlights what digital play looks like, the various ways it can be situated, and what young children do when they play together with digital devices in the…

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 examines the association between preschool classroom activity and the quality of the language spoken by teachers and children. Eighteen classrooms serving low-income children between the ages of 3 and 4 in Santiago de Chile were audio-recorded during one morning shift. Recordings were transcribed and segmented into…

Research Findings: This study explored the quality of teacher-child interactions within the context of a newly developed standardized task, Teacher-Child Structured Play Task (TC-SPT). A sample of 146 teachers and 345 children participated. Children who displayed the highest disruptive behaviors within each classroom were selected to participate.…

Research Findings: Shared book reading provides opportunities for adults to engage in literacy-related interactions with children in meaningful ways. Research has examined various dimensions of adult and child behavior during shared book-reading interactions with some focus on how book type affects the reading experience. Little research, however,…

Research Findings: In Study 1, we observed 32 Chinese kindergarteners playing a number board game with their caregivers in dyads. Number board game playing provided important opportunities for kindergarteners and their caregivers to talk about an array of number concepts, but their numeracy-related exchanges rarely went beyond counting. In Study…

Research Findings: Pretend play is an important context that supports young children's developing social-cognitive and creative abilities. The play behaviors of 70 sibling dyads in early and middle childhood were examined for the following indices of creativity in play: (a) play themes (set-up/organization, expected, creative), (b) object use…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

Research Findings: This study analyzed the quality of teacher-child interactions across 10 videotaped observations drawn from 5 different prekindergarten classrooms delivering the same mathematics curriculum: "MyTeachingPartner-Math." Interactions were coded using 2 observational measures: (a) a general measure, the Classroom Assessment…

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: Preschoolers' sleep patterns were examined related to cognitive and adaptive functioning. The sample consisted of 874 typically developing preschool children with a mean age of 40.01 months. Parent/caregiver reports of children's sleep pattern factors, Stanford-Binet 5 intelligence scale scores, and Behavior Assessment System…