Research Findings: This study examined whether teacher-child interaction quality varied as a function of type of activity in toddler classrooms in four European countries (Finland, Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal). It also investigated whether specific activity settings, namely levels of adult involvement, use of whole group, and children's…

Research Findings: This study aims to explore the relationships between Scientific Epistemic Beliefs (SEB), Science Teaching Beliefs (STB) and Science-specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge (Science-PCK) in preservice kindergarten teachers from China. Altogether 987 preservice teachers were randomly sampled from a teacher education institution and…

Research Findings: The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale--Revised (ECERS-R) is widely used to evaluate the quality of early childhood education and its association with child development. However, the psychometric properties of the ECERS-R are not well established. Consequently, in this study we tested 3 different factor solutions of the…

Research Findings: The quality of group care infants and toddlers experience relates to their concurrent and later development. Recent quality improvement initiatives point to the need for ecologically valid measures that assess the multifaceted nature of child care quality. In this article, we present the psychometric properties of an infant and…

Research Findings: Empathy, or the ability to understand what others are thinking or feeling, can be observed in early developmental stages. The purpose of this study was to validate the Spanish version of the Empathy Questionnaire (EmQue) and examine its longitudinal measurement invariance (LMI) at 2 time points. Parents of 103 children completed…

By adapting a self-administered assessment of coparenting, we sought to provide a new tool, the Cocaring Relationship Questionnaire, to measure parent-teacher, or cocaring relationships, and provide additional construct validity for the multidimensional concept of cocaring. Next, recognizing the importance of parental involvement for young…

Research Findings: A growing number of young children encounter group learning environment for the first time when entering preschool at age 3, yet their parents and teachers have no means to discern whether they are ready for this challenge. To address this uncertainty, this study developed and validated the Chinese Preschool Readiness Scale…

Research Findings: There is a growing need for accurate and efficient measures of classroom quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. Observational measures are costly, as their administration generally takes 3-5 hr per classroom. This article outlines the process of development and preliminary concurrent validity testing of…

Research Findings: Early mathematical skills and knowledge are strongly related to long-term achievement, and yet the knowledge base regarding the mechanisms through which young children develop these skills and knowledge is limited. Although research has examined the relation of the home numeracy environment and children's early mathematics…

Research Findings: The present study examined associations between children's classroom interactions and teachers' perceptions of teacher-child relationships during 1 year of preschool. Teachers (n = 223) reported their perceptions of closeness and conflict in their teacher-child relationships in the fall and spring. Children's (n = 895) positive…

Research Findings: Adults' attitudes about attachment relationships are central to how they perceive and respond to children. However, little is known about how attachment styles are related to teachers' attitudes toward and interactions with infants and toddlers. From a survey of 207 students taking early childhood (EC) courses at 4 U.S.…

Research Findings: This study provides the first independent investigation of the second most widely used multidimensional assessment in Head Start--the Preschool Child Observation Record, Second Edition (COR-2). We conducted a comprehensive investigation into the validity of the COR-2 using data from all children in an urban school district's…

Research Findings: This study investigated the relationship between features of the classroom environment and misalignment between teacher and observer ratings of preschoolers' classroom engagement and the extent to which years of teaching experience moderated this relationship. In a sample of 116 preschoolers and 21 teachers in 29 classrooms,…

Research Findings: The main goals of this study were to examine the factor validity of the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation (SCBE-30) scale using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis and to test factor invariance across gender in a sample of Italian preschool-age children (241 boys, 252 girls). The concurrent…

Research Findings: This exploratory study identified preschool teacher quality profiles in early childhood education settings using 9 indicators across teachers' professional background, observed process quality, and job attitudes toward teaching (e.g., job-related stress, satisfaction, and intention to leave the job). The sample consisted of 96…