The objective of the study was to characterise how pre-service kindergarten teachers used a Hypothetical Learning Trajectory on length and its measurement to notice children's mathematical thinking. A total of 64 pre-service kindergarten teachers enrolled in an Early Years Education mathematics teaching course were asked to notice teaching…

Programmable robotics is recently used in early childhood education (ECE) to introduce programming and computational thinking (CT) skills. However, there is a further need for research to contrast the efficacy of children's participation in robot programming and traditionally beneficial ECE activities. The present study thus investigated the…

Background: Learning trajectories (LTs) in early mathematics curriculum and teaching have received increasing attention (Baroody et al., 2019; Clements, 2007; Clements & Sarama, 2021; Maloney et al., 2014; Sarama & Clements, 2009). For example, LTs were a core construct in the National Research Council (2009) report on early mathematics…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Many young children receive developmental screenings because they do not perform basic self-regulation skills needed in preschool and home environments. Previous research on Literacy-Based Behavioural Interventions (LBBI) shows promise for promoting acquisition and maintenance of skills and routines; however, research has not yet examined the…

Are there differential benefits of training sequential number knowledge versus spatial skills for children's numerical and spatial performance? Three- to five-year-old children (N = 84) participated in 1 session of either sequential training (e.g., what comes before and after the number 5?) or non-numerical spatial training (i.e., decomposition of…

The study of functions is a critical route into teaching and learning algebra in the elementary grades, yet important questions remain regarding the nature of young children's understanding of functions. This article reports an empirically developed learning trajectory in first-grade children's (6-year-olds') thinking about generalizing functional…

This paper reports on a study that investigated the ways that young children interact with discrete programmable digital toys in a free play setting. One intention was to see whether this interaction would address some of the requirements of the Digital Technologies subject in the Australian Curriculum. The study was implemented in two phases in…

Language aptitude has been hypothesized as a factor that can compensate for postcritical period effects in language learning capacity. However, previous research has primarily focused on instructed contexts and rarely on acquisition-rich learning environments where there is a potential for massive amounts of input. In addition, the studies…

This article describes the case of a deaf native signer of American Sign Language (ASL) with a specific language impairment (SLI). School records documented normal cognitive development but atypical language development. Data include school records; interviews with the child, his mother, and school professionals; ASL and English evaluations; and a…

Body language and facial gesture provide sufficient visual information to support high-level social inferences from "thin slices" of behavior. Given short movies of nonverbal behavior, adults make reliable judgments in a large number of tasks. Here we find that the high precision of adults' nonverbal social perception depends on the slow…

Spontaneous language samples from 15 Mexican-American monolingual Spanish-speaking children between the ages of two and five were analyzed for the acquisition sequence of 10 morphemes: demonstratives, articles, copulas, and the regular present indicative; followed by irregular present indicative, regular preterite indicative, plurals, possessive…

Using a developmental model, the author explains a hierarchy which describes how a young child learns to respond to various types of environmental stimuli and discusses some educational consequences of a reinforcement stimuli deficit. Development is seen to take place in succession beginning with the primary level, proceeding to the social,…