Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is an educational imperative that requires supporting young learners in developing awareness about--and exploring--concepts, topics and vocabulary of significant importance in environmental education. Chawla (2009, "Journal of Developmental Processes," "4"(1), pp. 6-23) identified two…

As an art specialist intern at a museum-based preschool, the author facilitated an art studio session every afternoon for 5-year-old students. She naively envisioned children creating artworks that followed her lesson plans and instructions. However, as she embarked on this journey and began teaching these sessions, she witnessed two startling…

Visitors to public science festivals have a tremendous amount of free choice to decide how to navigate through the festival, as well as when, where, and how long to stop at an exhibit. This study examines how elementary-aged children individually or collaboratively engaged with festival exhibits at a public science festival in St. Petersburg,…

Harko Brown is an expert on traditional Maori games and play. He has written several books including Nga Taonga Takaro II: The Matrix (2016), and Te Mara Hupara (2017), co-authored by his teenage daughter Yves Tennessee Brown. In 2015 Harko was co-opted by the New Zealand Government to organise and lead the first Aotearoa New Zealand Maori…

Play is a traditional activity of children. Yet in order to ensure we are giving children time to play and opportunities to gain from the physical, cognitive, and emotional benefits of play, we need to find innovative ways to use play to ensure that all children are learning and meeting their potential.

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of increasing the time and frequency of recess opportunities when offered to elementary school students on student academic performance and to examine teachers' perceptions regarding recess. The opportunity to participate in unstructured play during a period of the school day called recess had…

The last half-century has seen a slow, tentative change in adult attitudes about young children's capacity to think abstractly. Parents and teachers know the young child as a dramatic mixture of the concrete, sense-bound, and the transcendent, and it is just that mixture, cultivated and pursued, which makes for philosophy. Young children's…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effects of cooperative physical activities on social interactions of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in China. Cooperative physical activities include procedures such as peer selection, peer practice, group task completion, and an interdependent group contingency. The intervention took…

Mind Mapping can be used in any discipline as a tool for learning and organizing information. Mind Maps can be created as a group as a means of supporting brainstorming or individually to generate ideas. The aim of the present study was to explore preschool children's and teacher trainees' conceptions of school, friendship, and play through Mind…

The "Developing Inclusive Youth" program is a classroom-based, individually administered video tool that depicts peer-based social and racial exclusion, combined with teacher-led discussions. A multisite randomized control trial was implemented with 983 participants (502 females; 58.5% White, 41.5% Ethnic/racial minority; M[subscript…

The aim of this research was to study how children's play behaviour was related to their cognitive skills and vocabulary development in integrated early childhood special education (ECSE) groups. The longitudinal study is part of the LASSO research project, which concerns children's stress regulation, learning and quality of early childhood…

Although education for sustainable development in early childhood has been a key issue globally at the preschool level for decades, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it does not receive the attention it deserves. For the future professional role of preschool teachers, it is important for them to develop the concept of sustainability as a fundamental…

The research literature well establishes that adverse conditions, such as poverty, can affect children's cognitive development and academic achievement. Educators are challenged to translate these understandings into instructional practices grounded in research that best meet the needs of students, especially students living in poverty who are at…

Participation in physical activity (PA) tends to decline between childhood and adolescence, and in Australia the bulk of this decline has been shown to occur in the domain of non-organised PA (e.g. active play, informal sports). A better understanding of the reasons for the decline in non-organised PA may support strategies to counter barriers and…

Interest-driven activities, such as mathematical play, can support student agency, motivation, and engagement, and can foster dispositions that reflect authentic disciplinary engagement. However, the bulk of research on mathematical play investigates the mathematics that emerges in young children's natural play or in informal spaces such as video…