Purpose: Children develop social-pragmatic understanding with the help of sensory, cognitive, and linguistic functions by interacting with other people. This study aimed to explore (a) associations between auditory, demographic, cognitive, and linguistic factors and social-pragmatic understanding in children who use bilateral hearing aids (BiHAs)…

Toddlerhood is a period of intensive and rapid socio-emotional development. The effects of different types of childcare settings on child development have been widely studied, but the results have often been contradictory. The aim of this study was to compare social competence and socio-emotional problems in two-year-old children (n = 1104; girls…

Engaging in extracurricular activities is known to affect both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, but there is social inequality in access to these activities. In this study, we examine the role of extracurricular activities in moderating the relationships between secondary school students' social background and their cognitive and…

Since prior research has mostly focused on children, less is known about how autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits interpret pragmatically complex social situations and the kind of narrative discourse they produce. 32 autistic young adults, 18 young adults with sub-clinical autistic traits and 34 non-autistic young adults…

The policy perspective provides an overview of literature and country approaches in an area where there is presently limited comparative information on national and system-wide approaches. The insights presented will be of interest to many OECD countries and beyond, as they consider ways to monitor and assess the social emotional skills which are…

This study examined longitudinal associations between parental psychological distress (stress and depression) when the child was 2 to 4 years and a child's emotional and behavioural problems at ages 3 to 4, and social functioning (loneliness and social competence) at age 11 in very preterm born children. The participants were Finnish families of…

There is a rapidly growing trend in Western countries to offer preschool education in nature. More information is urgently needed on whether the use of nature as a learning environment has beneficial or debilitating effects on the development of children's general school readiness skills. This study examined the differences in parent-reported…

Teacher-student relationship and students' social competence were investigated in relation to the quality of educational dialogue. The data consisted of 151 video-recorded Grade 2 lessons. The teachers (N = 50) also rated their students' (N = 664) social competence and the teacher-student relationship. In terms of teacher-student relationships,…

A major part of the perplexing instances in teachers' work seem to deal with relationships. However, little is known about the role of social and emotional competence (SEC) in teachers' relationships. This study examined perplexing relational situations through Finnish primary teachers' stories, the strategies that teachers used to manage the…

Frequent exposure to victimization by peers is related to greater psychological problems. It is often assumed that peer victimization is associated with fewer psychological problems in classrooms where defending victims of bullying is common (i.e., a norm). The few studies testing this claim have been cross-sectional and have produced mixed…

In this article, we examined young Finnish children's social relationships, characteristics of their parents' social networks and the role of parental networks in children's peer relationships. We drew on the data collected from a Finnish longitudinal study known as Steps to the Healthy Development and Well-Being of Children. The data from two…

In today's digital society, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and collaborative problem solving (CPS) have received increasing attention. CPS studies have often emphasized outcomes such as skill levels of CPS, whereas the action transitions in the paths to solve the problems related to these outcomes have been scarcely studied. The…

This article suggests that communities and social ties support the feeling of being meaningful. The theoretical concepts discussed here are social capital, community, and new forms of social ties. The data consists of 969 answers from citizens of different ages from three cities. Despite the possibilities of new global social ties, Finns seem to…

Cultivating responsible future citizens is of increasing importance in school education. The objective of this study is to identify the most prominent factors from the school needs-based support that enhance early adolescents' sense of responsibility, using Self-Determination Theory as the framework. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 3034…

Poor reading has been linked to negative outcomes on a wide range of emotional-behavioural dimensions in children. However, little is known about the time course of these associations. In this study we analyse data from a sample of Finnish children (N = 199; 106 boys) which included measures of reading fluency in grade 1 (age 7 or 8), and…