Only about 1% of the children receiving special education services are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). This group of children is highly heterogeneous with respect to a range of factors such as age of onset, degree of hearing loss, language and communication choices and access, and educational settings. Capturing the complex background of a DHH…

Early childhood is a critical period characterized by rapid development of motor and language skills. Reliably assessing motor and language development in early childhood is difficult, and there is a lack of agreement on measurement tool use. This scoping review aims to identify measurement tools used to examine motor and language skills in…

Although observational instruments are considered to be the gold standard for measuring toddler childcare quality, large-scale studies often have to rely on interviews or questionnaires. However, it remains unclear whether such reports can serve as reliable indicators for childcare quality. The present study used the ITERS and FCCERS to examine…

The Sustainable Development Goals mandate that by 2030, all children should have access to quality early child development opportunities, healthcare and pre-primary education. Yet validated measures of ECD in low and middle income countries (LMICs) are rare. To address this gap, a Systematic Review (SR) of measures available to profile the…

Practice and Policy: The preschool years represent a critical time to foster family engagement in education for children growing up in poverty. Yet the ways in which Latino families with lower levels of income engage with their children's education at home and at school might look different from how middle-income parents from the dominant U.S.…

For children age birth to five, physical, cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional growth and development occur at a rapid pace. While all children in this age range may not reach developmental milestones (e.g., smiling, saying first words, taking first steps) at the same time, development that does not happen within an expected timeframe can…

This study investigated the role of moral emotions in the development of children's sharing behavior (N = 244 4-, 8-, and 12-year-old children). Children's sympathy was measured with both self- and primary caregiver-reports, and participants anticipated their negatively and positively valenced moral emotions (i.e., feeling guilty, sad, or bad; and…

Relationships between the home environment and early developmental outcomes were examined in 166 children born very preterm in one tertiary maternity hospital to explore whether a more optimal home environment could promote resilience. In particular, we explored whether this effect was apparent over and above social risk and children's biological…

To understand the complex nature of bullies' acceptance and rejection, this article considered goal-framing effects of status and affection as they relate to the gender of the bully (male vs. female bullies), the target (male vs. female victims), and the evaluator (acceptance and rejection from male vs. female classmates). The hypotheses were…

Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRISs) have advanced and matured, a number of states and localities have undertaken evaluations to validate the systems. Such efforts stem from the desire to ensure that the system is designed and operating in the ways envisioned when the system was established. Given that a central component in a QRIS…

Reports such as this typically begin with a statistic designed to highlight a problem. The girls and boys to whom this edition of "The State of the World's Children" is dedicated are not problems. Rather, each is a sister, brother or friend who has a favourite dish, song or game; a daughter or son with dreams and the desire to fulfil…

Initial validation data are presented for the Risky Situation (RS), a 20-minute observational procedure designed to assess the father-child activation relationship with children aged 12-18 months. The coding grid, which is simple and easy to use, allows parent-child dyads to be classified into three categories and provides an activation score. By…

Program evaluation practices in early childhood care and education have been underdeveloped compared to the larger field of educational evaluation. The inclination not to include parental views in evaluation is mainly a result of the problem of positive response bias. Researchers who study client satisfaction with educational or child care…

The primary purpose of this article is to describe the development and utility of the Social Interaction Practices for the Preschool Years (SIPPY) questionnaire. The SIPPY is a tool designed to assess teachers' judgments of the acceptability and feasibility, as well as their current use, of literature-supported strategies for promoting the…

This study examined the psychometric characteristics of two parenting measures: the Parent Behavior Importance Questionnaire (PBIQ) and Parent Behavior Frequency Questionnaire (PBFQ). Both research questionnaires are based on the parent development theory (PDT) and offer parent as well as non-parent respondents the opportunity to rate 38 parenting…