High-quality early elementary years offer a critical opportunity for child development and academic learning for all children, regardless of their race, family-income level, or culture and home language. All students deserve access to high-quality teachers and leaders trained in how to effectively support their learning. They deserve to attend…

The Annie E. Casey Foundation's "2016 KIDS COUNT Data Book" finds today's youth--Generation Z--are healthier and completing high school on time despite mounting economic inequality and increasingly unaffordable college tuition. Aided by smart policies and investments in prevention, a record number of teens are making positive choices.…

Preparing students for entry into kindergarten is a key priority within the educational sector. Research has shown that students with lower levels of cognitive and socio-emotional competencies are less prepared for kindergarten entry and consequently perform more poorly on assessments in later grades (Duncan et al., 2007; Ensey Hoever, 2014;…

TV and DVDs serve an important role in the daily life of many families. Parents introduce their infants to video to keep them busy while the adults attend to chores. As members of the "Sesame Street Generation," parents also trust TV as a source of learning for their very young children. Research indicates that, in some cases, this trust…

The importance of nature-based play has gradually become forefront in an array of research fields. From the more obvious physical benefits to the complex mental benefits, nature has proved time and time again to be the cure-all for a variety of common ailments. Richard Louv, author of the famed "Last Child in the Woods," has spawned a…

During the preschool years, children develop an understanding of 2 types of real/not-real distinctions: ontological status and authenticity (Bunce & Harris, 2008). Two studies compared 3- to 5-year-old children's real/not-real judgments and justifications for 3 types of contrast involving a real entity and either a fictional character, a child…

Object labels are valuable communicative tools because their meanings are shared among the members of a particular linguistic community. The current research was conducted to investigate whether 13-month-old infants appreciate that object labels should not be generalized across individuals who have been shown to speak different languages. Using a…

In this article Jill Donovan shares her experiences as a parent in finding a healthy balance between protecting her sons and letting them take the risks necessary for growth. Like all parents, she often struggles with providing appropriate safety nets and trusting them (and the world) enough to let them try things and make mistakes. She describes…

In 2008, the research center "Individual Development and Adaptive Education" was constituted by the Goethe University, the German Institute for International Educational Research, and the Sigmund Freud Institute, all located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (http://www.idea-frankfurt.eu). The research of the center focuses on the…

Time is frequently expressed with spatial motion, using one of three different metaphor types: moving-time, moving-ego, and sequence-as-position. Previous work shows that children can understand and explain moving-time metaphors by age five (Ozcaliskan, 2005). In this study, we focus on all three metaphor types for time, and ask whether metaphor…

Relations between marital conflict, children's respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and fluid cognitive performance were examined over 3 years to assess allostatic processes. Participants were 251 children reporting on marital conflict, baseline RSA, and RSA reactivity (RSA-R) to a lab challenge were recorded, and fluid cognitive performance…

This study examined the effects of adult imitation and adult playfulness on the imitation, social attention and initiation of new behaviours by non-verbal preschoolers with autism. Videotapes taken from a previous study were recoded for the adult's imitation and playful behaviour and the children's imitation, social attention (looking at…

The reading process and reading development have been addressed by researchers for decades. As a result we know much about what reading is and how it happens. However, less is known about how reading influences other aspects of children's development, specifically the development of social imagination. To address this, we examined the narrative…

Many parents are in search of ways to best encourage their gifted children in the arts. As arts programs receive less financial and administrative support from the public school systems, parents are seeking additional resources. This article will provide a beginning point for parents to support artistic development for gifted children, based upon…

Although much research has examined the development of orienting to social directional cues (e.g., eye gaze), little is known about the development of orienting to nonsocial directional cues, such as arrows. Arrow cues have been used in numerous studies as a means to study attentional orienting, but the development of children's understanding of…