The issue of Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy is gaining popularity in the field of education. Most research on AI literacy has focused on primary, secondary, and higher education, and there has been limited examination of AI literacy programs in early childhood education. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of an eight-week AI literacy…

Young children increasingly interact with technological devices, either as a form of entertainment or for educational purposes. This research sought to investigate the early symbolic understanding of an interactive, three-dimensional digital image presented on a tablet. Two studies were designed in which the children had to use the image as a…

This research focuses on young children's understandings about economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Participants were 43 children, aged from 3 to 7 years of age, recruited from two kindergartens in Croatia. Children's ideas were discussed through semi-structured interviews that focused on saving, spending, recycling, justice,…

The purpose of this study is to analyse geometric transformations of children in the early childhood period. The study utilised a case study to design one of the qualitative research methods. Interviews were conducted with 6-, 7- and 8-year-old children, in total 24 children, who were enrolled in a private pre-school and a primary school of the…

Misconceptions about adaptation by natural selection are widespread among adults and likely stem, in part, from cognitive biases and intuitive theories observable in early childhood. Current educational guidelines that recommend delaying comprehensive instruction on the topic of adaptation until adolescence, therefore, raise concerns because…

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster…

One important socio-cultural medium through which young children's moral understanding is cultivated is parent/child discourse. Of particular interest to us was young children's use of basic ("thin") evaluative concepts ("good," "bad," "right" and "wrong"), which are ubiquitous in everyday…

Category-based induction is a hallmark of mature cognition; however, little is known about its origins. This study evaluated the hypothesis that category-based induction is related to semantic development. Computational studies suggest that early on there is little differentiation among concepts, but learning and development lead to increased…

This study examines how the Early Years Educators at Play (EYEPlay) professional development (PD) program transformed preschool teachers' reconceptualization of children's learning identities and abilities. The EYEPlay PD model was a yearlong program, which integrated drama strategies into literacy practices within classroom contexts.…

Purpose: The aims of the present research were to determine (a) the age at which children with typical development understand the concept of opposite, (b) whether this is related to other cognitive abilities or experiences, and (c) whether there is early implicit understanding of the concept. Method: Children (N = 204) between 3 and 5 years of age…

American students typically attend kindergarten at the chronological age (CA) of five and currently with the implementation of Common Core State Standards, there are expectations that children learn how to read in order to meet these academic standards, despite whether or not they are developmentally ready. This mixed methods study examined age…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…

Mathematics professor Julie Cwikla decided that she needed to investigate young children's understandings and see what precurricular partitioning notions young minds bring to the fraction table. Cwikla realized that only a handful of studies have examined how preschool-age and early elementary school-age students solve fraction problems (Empson…

Southern Peruvian Quechua is an indigenous language spoken primarily in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. The language includes a syntactic construction, "-paq", that expresses purpose or function, thus providing an opportunity to trace how parents and children with little formal education express teleological concepts. The…

Evidentiality in language marks how information contained in a sentence was acquired. For instance, Turkish has two past-tense morphemes that mark whether access to information was direct (typically, perception) or indirect (hearsay/inference). Full acquisition of evidential systems appears to be a late achievement cross-linguistically. Currently,…