Technologies have become an essential part of the daily life of our children. Consequently, artifacts that imply the early adoption of abstract thinking affect the imagination of children and young people in relation to the world of technology, now much more than they did in the past. With the emerging importance of robots in many aspects of our…

"Play Therapy: Basics and Beyond" is a comprehensive and insightful guide to the practice of play therapy. Presenting foundational and advanced skills with humor and fun, this book brings the practice of play therapy to life through real-life examples, interactive exercises, and thought-provoking reflections. For those new to play…

India has made rapid progress towards the universalization of school education, hand in hand with a decline in child labour. Despite progress, child labour persists in the country, just as school attendance and completion rates reveal gaps in educational attainment. This report addresses a timely need for new research to help decision-makers and…

A metacognitive learner acts in a planful way, monitors their progress, flexibly adapts their strategies, and reflects on their learning. Unsurprisingly, a metacognitive approach to learning is an important predictor of children's academic performance and many attempts have been made to promote metacognition in young children. The current…

Purpose: This paper aims to critically review the intersection of searching and learning among children in the context of voice-based conversational agents (VCAs). This study presents the opportunities and challenges around reconfiguring current VCAs for children to facilitate human learning, generate diverse data to empower VCAs, and assess…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with adults provide evidence that functional brain networks, including the default mode network and frontoparietal network, underlie executive functioning (EF). However, given the challenges of using fMRI with infants and young children, little work has assessed the developmental trajectories of…

The "UN Convention on the Rights of the Child" is one of the most widely-ratified human rights treaties, yet the visibility of children in the early years, in the mandatory government reports to the "UN Committee on the Rights of the Child" and in the Committee's concluding observations to States Parties, is relatively low…

Metaphors are frequently used in daily life. Many children on the autism spectrum have difficulties in comprehending and generating metaphors. The purpose of this study was to evaluate an equivalence-based instruction (EBI) procedure aimed at improving comprehension and expression of emotions in metaphors. Four Chinese boys on the spectrum…

Young, linguistically diverse learners often leverage multimodality to more fully express their ideas in writing. To better support and assess English writing development, it is vital to understand multimodality as part of their emerging writing skills. In this study, we examine how drawings and written language are used jointly in multimodal…

With a view of children as social negotiators, this study explored how preschool children's voices were nurtured through the implementation of an early-writing/applied phonics approach called Kid Writing (KW). The approach encouraged children to compose writing from their lives as they were guided by an adult who scaffolded the writing process. An…

There is considerable research regarding measures of early reading but much less in early writing. Nevertheless, writing is a critical skill for success in school and early difficulties in writing are likely to persist without intervention. A necessary step toward identifying those students who need additional support is the use of screening…

Global trends suggest that teaching writing focuses on a skills-based approach to preparing children for high-stakes standardised tests. In the early years, teachers are grappling with finding a better balance between preparing children for such tests and satisfying their sense of pedagogic responsibility to teach them to become joyful, creative…

Young children and their parents faced difficulties in their daily functioning due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this qualitative study, we explored the experiences and perceptions of parents and their young children regarding the pandemic process. A sample of 22 parents (mothers and fathers) and nine children aged between four and six…

This longitudinal cohort-study investigated the impact of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library (the Imagination Library) in Tamworth, Australia. The Imagination Library delivers age-appropriate books to children from the time of their birth until their fifth birthday. Caregivers of Tamworth children completed surveys about their experience with the…

The present study assessed the structural and functional representation of the upper limb in a large cohort (N = 84) of typically developing children aged 6 to 10. The first task aimed at obtaining a structural measure of the representation of the arm, specifically the two segments that compose it: the forearm and the hand. Participants were asked…