Research Findings: The classroom physical literacy environment is a malleable and domain-specific contributor to children's emergent literacy acquisition. However, what shapes the physical literacy environment remains unclear. In this study, we drew on a sample of 895 4-year-olds across 223 classrooms from the Professional Development Study and…

A major challenge to promoting effective early science and engineering education is the lack of reliable and validated assessments that align with current educational guidelines for science and engineering. Existing early science and engineering assessments either cover a narrow range of concepts and practices and/or are not designed in a way to…

Background: Publicly funded four-year-old preschool (or 4K) programs have expanded over the past several decades (Friedman-Krauss et al. 2021). Many high-quality preschool programs lead to gains in academic and social skills for students (Cascio and Schanzenbach 2013; Gormley and Gayer 2005; Weiland and Yoshikawa 2013; Wong et al. 2008),…

This publication summarizes an academic review paper on preschool effectiveness, "Lottery Evidence on the Impact of Preschool in the United States: A Review and Meta-Analysis" by Jesse Bruhn and Emily Emick. The 44 papers summarized fall into three categories: studies of three model preschool programs begun in the 1960s known as…

The Perry Preschool Project, the longest-running experimental study of an early childhood education program, demonstrates how such interventions can yield long-term personal, societal, and intergenerational benefits for disadvantaged populations. The evidence is clear: investments in high-quality early childhood education and parental engagement…

This paper reviews research on the design and effectiveness of preschools in the United States. Three randomized controlled trials that enrolled roughly 350 total children in demonstration studies during the 1960s and 1970s shape much of the current discussion of preschool. We examine what these studies and more recent ones based on random…

Building on the idea that the culture of an organisation has an extremely deep influence on the personalities, minds and identities of people who participate in it (Hofstede 2015) -- we reflected on how the US and Polish cultures' specific values and beliefs were represented and symbolised in the early childhood settings. We focused our analysis…

Early childhood education programs (ECE) invest in assessments of classroom quality to enable accountability and to enact efforts towards quality improvement. The "Early Childhood Environment Rating System -- Revised" (ECERS-R) and "Classroom Assessment Scoring System" (CLASS) are two widely used classroom quality assessments…

Students may engage in high rates of social approach responses at inappropriate times throughout the school day. One intervention that has been used to teach students appropriate and inappropriate times to access attention is a multiple schedule of reinforcement. In this study, we evaluated the efficacy of a multiple schedule that indicated when…

This article describes conceptual aspects, current policies and practices, and research representing the Israeli perspective regarding early childhood inclusion (ECI) at preschool ages (3-6 years). We review legislative, historical, attitudinal, philosophical, practical, empirical, and cultural issues regarding ECI in Israel. Finally, we focus on…

Introduction: Studies of Dynamic Assessment of cognitive abilities reveal that young children profit from assistance while carrying out tasks that elicit cognitive effort. Dynamic assessment refers to a test format of a pretest-mediation-posttest in which the mediation phase includes scaffolding to assist the child to grasp the purpose of the…

Bullying affects a significant number of school children in the United States. Great concern for teaching children about bullying is apparent in the number of picture books published with bullying themes. The following study is a content analysis of how bullies and victims are portrayed in picture books suitable for preschoolers. Many of the…

This study tested whether and how methods called 'Play Time/Social Time' and 'I Can Problem Solve' contribute to the improvement of social skills and the development of theory of mind (ToM) in children. The participants in the experiment were nearly 200 (N = 196) preschool children with low social functioning, with and without disabilities. The…

Background: Preschool physical education has been largely unexplored by researchers. This article examines the meaning of the term "physical education", in relation to preschool contexts, to 14 practitioners working at three preschool settings in Scotland. Our focus on preschool physical education reflects a change in the language…

In an attempt to address risk factors associated with extensive nonfamilial child care, we implemented the preschool life skills (PLS) program (Hanley, Heal, Tiger, & Ingvarsson, 2007) in two community-based Head Start classrooms. A multiple baseline design across classrooms, repeated across skills, showed that the program resulted in a 5-fold…