Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated…

High quality early childhood teachers have a wealth of knowledge and use a range of skills in their daily classroom practices, and research has consistently demonstrated the positive influence effective early childhood teachers have on children's development and long-term outcomes. Given the importance of practicum experiences in the development…

This study investigates the relationship between early maternal employment history and children's vocabulary and inductive reasoning ability at age 5, drawing on longitudinal information on 2,200 children from the Growing Up in Scotland data. Prior research rarely addresses dynamics in maternal employment and the methodological ramifications of…

Through my autobiographical reflective ethnography of my Soviet childhood, schooling and teaching, I try to investigate the phenomenon of political multiple consciousness that I observed in the USSR and its development in children. In my analysis, I abstracted eight diverse types of consciousness, five of which are political in their nature.

Plays and toys have an important place in the education of children. Children learn by seeing and doing rather than reading, listening and understanding. Play is an important "job" for children. The basic function of plays is to facilitate children's adaptation to the world. Children can understand the real world by playing. They deal…

Background: Despite widespread use of digital toys, research evidence of how a digital toy's features affect children's development and the nature of parent-child interactions during play is limited. Objective: The present study aimed to examine how mother-child dyads experience a traditional stuffed toy and an animated digital toy by comparing…

The article attempts to analyze critically the role of the modern school in the development of human potential. Based on the conducted research procedures (the focus group study of the parent community, the questionnaire survey N = 90), they determined the domination of parental position, according to which there is the lack of equal opportunity…

The purpose of this study was to establish a set of normative data (growth curve and centiles) for the Infant Monitor of vocal Production (IMP) using a representative population of infants with typically developing hearing. A linear mixed effect model and regression was used to derive 'stage-for-age' trajectory and growth centiles from the…

This study examined socioeconomic gradients in different domains of early child development using data from the validation sample of the East Asia-Pacific Early Child Development Scales. The Scales were administered to 7797 3- to 5- year-olds (3889 girls) from Cambodia, China, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and Vanuatu and children's…

Children's family structures are increasingly diverse and changing, and family structure and stability have implications for child developmental outcomes. These increasing distinct structures include households where children reside with grandparents or foster parents. Gaps exist in the knowledge base regarding whether these children report…

This article offers a critique of Ofsted's Bold Beginnings report based on the author's own experience as an early years practitioner. It draws attention to the growing 'readiness' agenda of the Department for Education (DfE) and to its focus on a primarily transmission-based model of teaching. It reaffirms the necessity of an approach to the…

Media use by young children, even those 2 years old and younger, continues to increase. Many parents and professionals believe media, including digital devices, enhances cognitive and overall development. However, there is a misconception about what promotes healthy minds and bodies. Brain development, the foundation for all abilities, including…

Although the human proclivity to engage in impression management and care for reputation is ubiquitous, the question of its developmental outset remains open. In 4 studies, we demonstrate that the sensitivity to the evaluation of others (i.e., evaluative audience perception) is manifest by 24 months. In a first study, 14- to 24-month-old children…

Collaborative group work has the potential for providing rich opportunities for children to learn through talk with peers; however, in practice, little effective engagement in learning is observed within authentic learning contexts. Exploratory talk is associated with high levels of cognitive challenge within collaborative group work. Detailed…

In the past decade, American and Canadian pediatric societies have recommended that pediatric care clinicians follow a schedule of routine surveillance and screening for young children to detect conditions such as developmental delay, speech and language delays and disorders, and autism spectrum disorder. The goal of these recommendations is to…