The host of the internationally popular early childhood podcast "That Early Childhood Nerd" provides a framework for understanding the importance of free play. Free play is disappearing from the lives of too many young children, leaving them vulnerable to negative effects on their physical and mental health, social and emotional growth,…

Multi-sensory environments are widely used with autistic children. However, there are no data on how autistic children choose to spend time in the room and how this relates to their sensory, behavioural and intellectual profiles. We observed the frequency and duration of visits to multi-sensory environment equipment of 41 autistic children during…

Background: Children with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) display impaired pretend play abilities, reflective of broader social-cognitive challenges. Pretend play interventions for children with PWS demonstrate preliminary efficacy for improving cognitive and affective processes in play. It is unknown which specific intervention strategies, such as…

Early experiences in STEM education can contribute to positive cognitive development in young children. When students have the opportunities to play, inquire, follow their interests/curiosities, develop STEM identities, be creative, and operate within concrete/contextualized STEM explorations, they will experience expansive cognitive growth.…

This study examined the relationship between young children's cognitive development and fathers' engagement in early childhood. The study examined fathers' home engagement patterns based on literacy, play, and caregiving activities when their children were 9-month-old and these patterns of engagement in 9-month-old were related to children's…

Although exploratory play is considered a hallmark of cognitive development and learning, relatively few studies have been able to quantitatively characterize the shifts that may occur in children's approach to exploration. One reason for this gap is due to challenges coding and analyzing children's exploratory play behavior. In our paper, we…

This study aims to bridge a gap between Vygotsky's seminal framework on the importance of make-believe play and adult scaffolding in children's cognitive development (e.g. executive function [EFs]) and research in cognitive neuroscience. Kindergarten children (N = 160) and teachers (N = 12) took part in the study. EFs skills and make-believe play…

This is a conceptual paper based on existing literature aiming to provide practical information on designing and implementing activities to promote children's computational thinking. Computational thinking is a relatively new term in early childhood education that refers to a specific problem-solving thinking process involving various logical and…

The individual's learning process begins with birth and continues with discoveries in the living spaces. The curiosity-driven learning process is the basis of cognitive development, and nowadays, much research is being done to understand this development field. Determining the focal point of research on cognitive development in preschool in Turkey…

Pretend play is often hypothesized in a global sense to be an effective context for young children's learning, but there is much still to learn about whether all types of information can be learned equally and whether all types of pretend play are equally beneficial. The present study tests whether preschoolers can learn a simple, novel causal…

The present article aims to systematically summarize the effects of free-play (FP) on preschool-aged children's physical activity (PA) level, and motor (MC), cognitive (CC), and socioemotional competence evaluated through randomized controlled trial (RCT) design. A systematic review of relevant articles was carried out using two electronic…

This paper follows an earlier report of young children's object play activities investigated in a cross-sectional sample of 289 typically developing children. Thirty-minute videotaped observations were taken of children at 8, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, 54, and 60 months of age in their homes. Forty-nine percent were boys. Children were identified…

The aim of this research was to study how children's play behaviour was related to their cognitive skills and vocabulary development in integrated early childhood special education (ECSE) groups. The longitudinal study is part of the LASSO research project, which concerns children's stress regulation, learning and quality of early childhood…

The benefits of musical play in cognitive development have recently received an upsurge of interest in the field of early childhood music education research. This study examines the positive learning transfer from a musical play early-learning system® to cognitive development. Specifically, we investigated the effects of early musically enriched…

The author discusses gender differences in children's play and its relation to the programs of "Sesame Street," which for fifty years has sought to enhance children's physical, cognitive, and social development through playful learning. Gender differences in children's play, she asserts, are vast, and she notes that, consequently, boys…