This study was conducted to investigate the effects of learning trajectories-based coding (LTs) and LTs-based program on preschoolers' length, area, volume, and angle measurement skills. A quasi-experimental research design was utilized with a quantitative approach. The study's participants were 47 children between the ages of 55-71 months who…

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.…

Regular engagement outside may promote healthy physical and psychological development as well as a respect and appreciation for nature. This exploratory study compared biophilia and attitudes toward nature between young children living in an urban area to those in a rural area. Urban and rural areas may offer different opportunities for exposure…

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: 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: 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…

This study described the commenting practices of Head Start teachers, and the relationship of comments to the expressive and receptive vocabulary growth of children with below-the-mean language ability across one year of preschool. Participants included 52 Head Start teachers, and 489 children (247 early intervention candidates and 242 Head Start…

Developing leadership among early childhood professionals has become increasingly important as investing in children's early years has been championed as a public and private national and international priority. Two case studies present how oral inquiry and specifically, the Prospect Center's Descriptive Review of a Professional Dilemma of…

In an effort to promote best practices regarding mathematics teaching and learning at the preschool level, national advisory panels and organizations have emphasized the importance of children's emergent counting and related competencies, such as the ability to verbally count, maintain one-to-one correspondence, count with cardinality, subitize,…

As digital media devices have been increasingly used in early childhood educational settings, this study examined whether the iPad with a Vygotskian social development approach--namely, More Knowledgeable Other--can be integrated into low-income preschool classrooms to improve science learning. An analysis of variance was used to examine the…

School gardening has become increasingly popular as a context for learning in which children construct new knowledge, learn cultural and societal values related to ecological awareness, and develop and practice authentic or real-world skills (Blair, 2009; Bowker & Tearle, 2007). The present research was a longitudinal case study of children's…

Purpose: The current study investigated the effects of coaching as part of an emergent literacy professional development program to increase early childhood educators' use of verbal references to print and phonological awareness during interactions with children. Method: Thirty-one educators and 4 children from each of their classrooms (N = 121)…

The Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study is a polyvocal, multi-sited project on immigration and early childhood education and care in five countries: Italy, Germany, France, England and the USA. The complicated nature of the data pushed us as a group to expand our methodological resources to not only organize the data but also to make it…

This study investigates the ongoing debate in the conceptual change literature between unitary and elemental perspectives on students' knowledge structure coherence. More specifically, the current study explores two potential explanations for the conflicting results reported by Ioannides and Vosniadou (2002)and diSessa, Gillespie, and Esterly…