Preschool is a particularly opportune time to introduce measures that promote parental school-based involvement, as this is when the initial contact with the school is made. In Québec, a French-speaking province in Canada, voluntary school-based preschools for 4-year-olds have been offered to families in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. A component…

Narrative story stem techniques (NSSTs) offer insight into attachment and other representational aspects of preschool to young school aged children's inner lives. While the method moved into the academic and clinical mainstream some 35 years ago, their applicability to "non-Western" contexts remains little understood. This synthesis…

Given the benefits of critical consciousness (CC), it is important to consider what environmental levers may promote it. Higher-quality education experiences have served as key contextual supports for marginalized youth. Notably, investment in the quality of education for preschoolers has one of the highest rates of return for society compared…

For decades, important early childhood scholars who critiqued normative ideas about early childhood frameworks, guidelines, and assessments have been silenced in highly ranked child development and early childhood journals. The qualitative methods needed to prioritize the perspectives of marginalized communities (i.e., ethnography, interview and…

Balancing the allocation of preschool education resources is a crucial objective within China's preschool education reform. Our analysis focused on investigating the disparities between regions and urban-rural areas in China from 2011 to 2019, employing the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), spatial analysis,…

Background: Socio-economic status (SES) is a powerful predictor of attainment. Research has identified multiple mechanisms that underpin the effect of SES on attainment. For example, self-regulation (processes through which individuals direct and control their attention, emotion and behaviour) has been identified as one mechanism mediating the SES…

Parent participation is fundamental to children's early literacy development and later academic success. This small-scale qualitative study located in the interpretivist paradigm utilised semistructured interviews to collect data from two Grade R teachers' concerning their perceptions of parent participation in children's early literacy…

Quality dialogue and interactions in the classroom are crucial for creating effective learning environments and reducing inequalities from an early age. Dialogic reading interventions are known to be beneficial in early childhood education, but there is still much to learn about creating the most conducive interactions in the classroom. This…

Background: Despite evidence on their short-term effectiveness, the long-term effects of group-based parenting interventions are unclear, programs are hard to scale up, and effects on parents of infants and toddlers are mixed. Objective: We evaluate the impact of a parenting intervention, "Crianza Positiva," that combines 8 group…

Research Findings: With individuals' increased access to information and communication technologies (ICT) in many places around the world, the definition of the digital divide has become more complicated than referring to differences in accessing technologies. As early childhood education (ECE) may impact children's life-long learning and…

Quality early childhood education (ECE) can improve children's learning and development in low- and middle-income countries, but little evidence exists of programs targeting marginalized girls in vulnerable rural communities. This study used a matched-pair mixed-methods community-randomized trial to evaluate a preschool program for marginalized…

Background: One can argue that literacy practices work to produce forms of literacy knowledge and literate children in early childhood contexts. However, one needs to interrogate how these literacy practices create technologies of power that construct and normalise the school ready literate child. Aim: The ethnographic study employed in this…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been found to be beneficial for the development of children below three years. However, many children do not attend ECEC facilities. Frequently, structural family characteristics (SFC), such as migration background, educational attainment and income, are used to explain differing probabilities of…

The goal of Smithsonian Science for North and South Carolina Classrooms was to provide teachers with ongoing, differentiated professional development and research-based curricular materials to improve elementary student achievement in science, mathematics, and reading. This work used an inquiry-based science curriculum, Smithsonian Science for the…

The five-year project, "Smithsonian Science for North and South Carolina Classrooms" (hereafter "Smithsonian Science"), offers important evidence on the impact of the phenomena-driven science curriculum, "Smithsonian Science for the Classroom," paired with ongoing, differentiated, high-quality professional learning…