Purpose: A common goal of peer-mediated interventions is to train peers to successfully initiate and maintain social and linguistic interactions with a target child in the classroom. Ample evidence indicates that peer-mediated interventions improve social and linguistic outcomes for students in the primary and later grades with developmental…

Background: Rapid growth in early childhood device usage has raised critical questions about the potential impact of digital storybooks on children's reading outcomes. The current study examined how two types of multimedia animations in digital storybooks -- animations of storyline elements or details in the illustrations -- influenced the story…

The aim of this pilot study was to examine the immediate and long-term effects of an intervention program that aims to improve preschoolers' (N = 36, M = 4.49 years, SD = 0.35) early numeracy skills by combining the learning of numerical relational skills via story reading with fundamental motor skill practice. The intervention program was piloted…

This research report is on fostering young children's metacognitive skills. The study was conducted at a private early childhood education center in a Midwestern city in the United States in 2020. The design of the study was a mixed approach including Time Series experimentation, naturalistic observation, and interviews. Children aged 3-4 years…

Conversation circles in kindergartens can foster discursive abilities such as argumentation. This paper analyzes argumentation in conversation circles in a kindergarten with respect to the function of narrative argumentation. We focus on second stories as a specific narrative form that is characterized by relating in content and form to a before…

In the current study, single case research methodology was used to examine whether preschool children's engagement in book reading activities was greater when the protagonist in the book was of the same or different race as the child participant. Initiations, accurate responses to questions, passive engagement, teacher redirections, and child…

Theory of Mind (ToM) is an individual's ability to understand the cognitive states of others, including their desires, beliefs, and knowledge. ToM describes how children, by the age of four, understand how others may be thinking or feeling. It is the ability to understand the thinking or viewpoints of their peers. This paper will describe ToM…

The aim of this research was to explore the progression of narrative macro-structure in Chinese children between the ages of 3 and 6 in preschool. To investigate the narratives of young children in a Chinese prefecture-level city kindergarten, the study selected the wordless picture book "Frog, Where Are You?" as their material. They…

Children vary widely in their number knowledge by the time they enter kindergarten, and this variation is related to their future academic success. Although talk about number predicts children's early understanding of foundational number concepts, we know little about whether interventions can increase this talk nor about the types of number talk…

Home literacy experiences and observed parent and child behaviors during shared book reading were investigated in preschool-age children with hearing loss and with typical hearing to examine the relationships between those factors and children's language skills. The methods involved parent-reported home literacy experiences and videotaped…

Research Findings: The present study examined children's listening comprehension during a two-semester-long dialogic reading. We explored the extent to which the development of children's listening comprehension was accounted for by initial listening comprehension and whether children's engagement and the amount and level of their verbal…

Purpose: Shared reading provides preschool-age children with the opportunity to learn novel, low-frequency words. Abundant empirical evidence demonstrates that children can learn the meanings of such words during shared reading, referred to as "semantic learning." However, less is known about whether children learn the spellings of words…

This paper describes the role of data and task context in young children's interpretation of and reasoning about data tables. A design-based descriptive study was conducted with fourteen 5-year-old children in their first year of formal schooling. A picture storybook provided the data context for a data modelling activity that focused on…

This study examined the moral discourse of 79 dyads of Taiwanese parents and children during shared storybook readings and the associations with children's cognitive and affective moral attributions. This study involved four- to six-year-old children who participated in a receptive language test and a moral reasoning task. Their responses were…

Research Findings: Anthropomorphized animal characters have been associated with negative influences on educational outcomes for young children, for example story comprehension and prosocial learning from moral tales. In this study we investigate how character realism and moral theme influence young children's recall of the story content. Retells…