Effective communication is a fundamental aspect of children's daily living, enabling interaction with adults and peers. A rich literature suggests that communicative abilities develop with age, while little is known about cross-cultural differences and similarities. This study presents a comparison of the communicative performance of Finnish (n =…

Several factors might affect outdoor play (individual and family aspects, neighbourhood environment, policy and socio-cultural factors). The Covid-19 lockdowns became a barrier to outdoor play and had a greater impact on children with disabilities. This study describes the outdoor activities and play and the contextual factors that affected them…

Objective: Transition from school to early adulthood incurs many changes and may be associated with deterioration in general health in youth with autism. We aimed to investigate this. Method: The National Longitudinal Transitions Study-2 is a USA nationally representative sample of youth receiving special education services, aged 13-17 at wave 1,…

Shooting incidents at kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) schools in the United States have sparked calls to increase security or adopt altogether new approaches to school safety. These approaches include allowing teachers or staff to carry firearms in some schools. To learn what teachers across the United States think about school safety…

Community college students frequently decide to withdraw from college without achieving their educational goals. In decades of research into student attrition and retention, very few studies have asked the students themselves why they chose to leave. This concurrent triangulation mixed methods study sought to add to the literature by analyzing…

This study explores an understudied yet critically important role in higher education: the academic department chair. Building on research related to the gendered organization of faculty life and using a national sample of department leaders per the COACHE "Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey" (n = 1,173), we use descriptive discriminant…

Aphasia therapy should address communication in everyday contexts. One type of social interaction that occurs frequently in the daily lives of spouses is joint decision-making. Currently, no known study has investigated how spouses collaboratively make decisions when one of the spouses has aphasia and the other one does not. The purpose of this…

According to Vygotsky's cultural-historical activity theory, pretend play can be an important context for the development of children's social competence. The aim of this meta-analysis was to synthesize the current evidence about the relation between pretend play and social competence in early childhood (age 3-8 years). A systematic literature…

Generation Alpha are the first to grow up immersed in digital technology and presumed to be wired differently than previous generations. This systematic review synthesizes the research literature on what has been learned so far and broadly answers the following question: What is happening in the education and training of Generation Alpha? The…

Despite historically high literacy rates, there has been declining reading proficiency amongst students in Iceland. This decline has caused concern and created a need to better understand foundational reading growth in the Icelandic school context. This study aimed to evaluate reading growth patterns in letter sound fluency, nonsense word fluency,…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries have eliminated face-to-face classes in all schools, requiring all teachers to deliver classes remotely. In this regard, the wide spread of information and communication technology (ICT) products and services in the educational sector became a burden for several teachers. This article aims to study…

In recent years, the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network has observed a shift in racial disparities in autism. To delineate the historical shift of racial disproportionality in US autism prevalence, our literature review examines three key topics: publication trends concerning racial disproportionality in autism, discernible…

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the federal government responded by expanding the country's safety-net programs, including through stimulus payments. There were also significant federal policy changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the largest food assistance program in the United States. Benefit amounts were increased,…

Recent work indicates that gender-inclusive advertisements can increase women's involvement in STEM fields. However, it remains less clear whether these inclusionary efforts would benefit more from focusing on the pragmatic utility or moral need for inclusivity. This study extends this work by determining the extent to which two unique inclusivity…

South Asians have become a sizable ethnic minority in Hong Kong with unique health and social needs often being overlooked. Elevated obesity risk among South Asians has been highlighted in high-income Western settings; however, relevant local evidence is scarce. This cross-sectional study aims to explore the obesity prevalence and related risk…