Standards and competencies are critical structural supports for any professional workforce, including early childhood professionals. Workforce capacity building, career progression, and career longevity can be supported by the foundation of consistent competency expectations. Defining and embedding consistent, evidence-based competencies is a…

Against the background of the low mathematical performance of South African learners in international panel studies, there is an urgent need to improve mathematical education. In particular, the curriculum and its structure raise questions. It is logical that the prescribed curricula should align with learners' developmental trajectories. Given…

Early experiences matter. The quality of the early care and education provided to young children not only impacts their experiences now, but directly contributes to their future success in school and in life. High-quality early learning experiences require effective educators but attainment and application of these critical knowledge and skills is…

The science is unequivocal in showing that infants and toddlers begin learning very young, and the workforce must be equipped with the specific skills and practices to fully support this important period of development. A major conclusion in the 2015 report from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, "Transforming the…

The new Institute of Medicine/National Research Council report, "Transforming the Workforce for Children From Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation" (2015), begins with a summary of the science of early development and learning, with particular attention to discoveries during the past 15 years since the publication of "From…

Documentation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions has been developed for decades in various contexts. Today, documentation is preferred as an inclusive method of evaluating, planning, and developing ECEC in the curricula of many countries. Qualitative research on documentation has increased in past years, but quantitative…

This article presents a snapshot of the mathematical competencies of children aged four to five years in Australian early childhood education settings, as perceived by their educators. Data are presented from a nationally-representative sample of 6511 children participating in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). The results…

This study evaluated relationships between a school counselor's implementation of the Student Success Skills (SSS) program with 203 students in grades K-3 and teacher ratings of student competency on five learning behaviors from the ASCA Mindsets & Behaviors for Student Success (American School Counselor Association, 2014). Using a paired…

The aim of the present study was to ascertain the effects of the five-month implementation of the comprehensive inductive educational approach on the social behaviour of kindergarten children. The sample consisted of 52 children in the experimental group and 48 children in the control group, aged from 2.6 to 6.0 years. The kindergarten teachers…

Early Childhood Education as a subject in primary schools in Nigeria was first noticed among the private primary schools in the 80s while the public primary schools did not incorporate it in their curriculum in Nigeria. Of recent, some state governments in Nigeria have just adopted and organized early childhood education unit into their primary…

Purpose: The authors set out to determine (a) whether African American children's spontaneous spoken language met use criteria for a revised minimal competence core with original and added morphosyntactic patterns at different geographical locations, and (b) whether pass/fail status on this core was differentiated on other criterion measures of…

This study investigated the differential and persistent effects of a state-funded pre-K program, the Virginia Preschool Initiative (VPI). We analyzed data from a cohort of over 60,000 students nested in approximately 1000 schools from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of first grade using two-level hierarchical logistic regression models.…

The author offers lessons learned from three related initiatives of the Wheelock College Institute for Leadership and Career Initiatives from 1997 to 2003 that aimed to promote authentic early care and education leadership by people who came from the community and who hold the same values as the population being served: "Taking the Lead",…

When children start school it is not just a transition to a new physical context, but also an entry point to a new "culture" where aspects of teaching, learning and assessment are different, and hence what it means to be a learner is constructed differently. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in making links between…