This article proposes the existence of an "Isadora Effect": the propositions that motor development plays a primal role in brain development, and the first understanding of symbolic meaning among young children occurs from an understanding of movement and gesture. Anecdotal evidence for the past few decades has demonstrated that dance…

Impairments in postural control affect the development of motor and social skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This review compared the effect of different sensory conditions on static standing postural control between ASD and neurotypical individuals. Results from 19 studies indicated a large difference in postural control…

Background: Fundamental motor skill proficiency is essential for engagement in sports and physical play and in the development of a healthy lifestyle. Children with motor delays (with and without disabilities) lack the motor skills necessary to participate in games and physical activity, and tend to spend more time as onlookers than do their…

The development of the correspondence between real and imagined motor actions was investigated in 2 experiments. Experiment 1 evaluated whether children imagine body position judgments of fine motor actions in the same way as they perform them. Thirty-two 8-year-old children completed a task in which an object was presented in different…

How do schoolchildren respond when they encounter a wheelchair user in a fictional text? This article describes a doctoral project where groups of children were presented with excerpts from books by Hilary McKay and Jacqueline Wilson in which wheelchair users play a significant role. The pupils were asked to discuss issues arising from these…

In today's physical education classroom, many teachers feel starved for fresh, innovative activities to teach. This article presents team handball (TH) as one such activity. Although TH is not a new activity (it was first played toward the end of the 19th century in countries such as Denmark, Germany and Sweden), for many students in the United…

The number and timing of stressors experienced during pregnancy were investigated using longitudinal data from the Western Australian Pregnancy (Raine) Study cohort (N = 2,900). Motor development data were collected at 10 (n = 1,622), 14 (n = 1,584), and 17 (n = 1,222) years using the McCarron Assessment of Neuromuscular Development. Linear mixed…

Background: Language outcomes for children with cochlear implants (CIs) vary widely, even for those implanted before 2 years of age. Identifying the main influencing factors that account for some of the variability is important in order to provide information to guide appropriate clinical and intervention services for young children with CIs.…

Understanding the characteristics of preschool-age children is an important and first step for supporting children's healthy development and school readiness. Children may show different developmental features and come different social, socio-cultural background; however, they are in the same age. Reaching of education at a desired level will be…

The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of an educational program in improving the level of knowledge of parents about natural growth indicators in the development of children and determining the indicators which delay development in children from birth to three years old. The sample of the study consisted of 60 volunteers who…

This study investigated the psychometrics of a recently developed global rating measure of videotaped parent-infant interaction, the "Manchester Assessment of Caregiver-Infant Interaction" (MACI), in a normative sample. Inter-rater reliability, stability over time, and convergent and discriminant validity were tested. Six-minute play…

The major purpose of this study was to investigate whether successful practice trials in throwing would mediate the relationship between perceived throwing competence and skill improvement in throwing among 1 st graders in physical education. A correlational research design was utilized to examine the mediating relationships among variables.…

A pioneer in the infant/family field in the United States, Magda Gerber was the founding director of Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE), known for its unique two-generation approach to the care and education of young children. This paper offers a summary of Gerber's teachings from the late twentieth century with citations pointing to their…

Restricted and repetitive behaviors are a core feature of autism spectrum disorder. This descriptive study documented the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviors in 85 toddlers with autism spectrum disorder as they interacted with their caregiver in a play interaction. For each child restricted and repetitive behavior, a caregiver…

Commencing with a discussion of the various conceptions of education for the development of humanity, this essay articulates four essential vectors of educational processes--epistemic, ethical, aesthetic, and political, as they are instantiated in Physical Education. Drawing on philosophical literature, it is argued that the sporting activities…