In many countries, education policies are shifting towards inclusive education. Human rights have always been an important argument for this development, but the effects on students should be an important factor when designing policies. In this review, therefore, literature on the effects of inclusion on both students with and without special…

Listening skills are fundamental in the author's approach to teaching music to children. As a Suzuki instructor, the author is always looking for ways to help students listen more effectively. This article sets forth ways listening can be fostered, both in private instrumental study and in general music preschool and elementary classrooms. The…

Global developmental delay (GDD) is defined as evidence of significant delays in two or more developmental domains. Our study determined the cognitive skills of a cohort of young children with GDD. A retrospective chart review of all children diagnosed with GDD within a single developmental clinic was carried out. Scores on fine motor (Peabody…

Temperament refers to individual differences in two broad aspects of behavior: (1) emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity and (2) self-regulatory processes that modulate such reactivity. These individual differences are grounded in people's constitution and influence both stress reactions and patterns of coping. In this chapter, we examine…

The detrimental effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on the developing brain include structural brain anomalies as well as cognitive and behavioral deficits. Initial neuroimaging studies of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) confirmed previous autopsy reports of overall reduction in brain volume and…

Immigrant children from diverse language backgrounds face not only linguistic challenges when enrolled in mainstream English-medium classrooms, but also difficulties adjusting to an unfamiliar learning community. The culture of primary school classrooms in New Zealand typically reflects conventions across three dimensions: interactional,…

Research Findings: A description of the development and preliminary validation of the Affect in Play Scale-Preschool version (APS-P) is presented by demonstrating associations among preschool children's play, creativity, and daily behavior using multiple methodologies. Thirty-three preschool-age children completed a standardized 5-minute play task…

Research and theorizing on executive function (EF) in childhood has been disproportionately focused on preschool age children. This review paper outlines the importance of examining EF throughout childhood, and even across the lifespan. First, examining EF in older children can address the question of whether EF is a unitary construct. The…

Philosophical and psychological opinion is divided over whether moral sensitivity, understood as the ability to pick out a situation's morally salient features, necessarily involves emotional engagement. This paper seeks to offer insight into this question. It reasons that if moral sensitivity does draw significantly on affective capacities of…

This study compared the cognitive control skills of male incarcerated adolescents (n = 44), male control adolescents (n = 33), male incarcerated young adults (n = 41), and male control young adults (n = 35) using the AX-continuous performance test (AX-CPT). This test measures proactive control (the ability to maintain a mental representation of…

Associations between parenting quality and 3-year-olds' school readiness, receptive, and expressive language were examined in relation to the amount of time they spent in childcare, based on data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,364). Associations for school readiness and receptive language were stronger among…

The past decade has seen an upsurge in public understanding of early brain development. News reports, statements by policymakers, and commercial marketing of products for infants and young children have all contributed to a widespread understanding of the explosive growth of the brain in the early years and that stimulation acts as a catalyst to…

Previous research has reported that children's numerical equivalence judgments are affected by surface similarity and counting ability (e.g. Mix, Huttenlocher, & Levine, 1996; Siegel, 1973), a pattern that suggests categorization processes play a role in numerical development. However, because these studies involved memory for sets, large set…

Using a sticker search task, Gentner and Rattermann ("Perspectives on thought and language: Interrelations in development" (Gelman & Byrnes, Eds.), pp. 225-227, 1991) found that the ability to ignore surface features and match objects in terms of relative size emerged around 5 years of age. However, because spatial position covaried with relative…

Search for a ball that has undergone hidden motion rapidly improves during the second year of life ("Dev. Psychol.," 2000; 36:394-401). In three experiments we investigated whether the poor performance of younger toddlers was due to attentional failure by highlighting the major cue for the hidden object. We observed only slight improvement in…