Purpose: The authors examined the language used by mothers from low-income and rural environments with their infants at ages 6 and 15 months to identify predictors of maternal language use at the 15-month time point. Method: Maternal language use by 82 mothers with their children was documented during book-sharing interactions within the home in a…

One of the major questions of human development is how early experience impacts the course of development years later. Children adopted from institutional care experience varying levels of deprivation in their early life followed by qualitatively better care in an adoptive home, providing a unique opportunity to study the lasting effects of early…

Compared to skilled adult readers, children typically make more fixations that are longer in duration, shorter saccades, and more regressions, thus reading more slowly (Blythe & Joseph, 2011). Recent attempts to understand the reasons for these differences have discovered some similarities (e.g., children and adults target their saccades…

Hachey (2013) aptly describes a recent surge in attention to mathematics for young children. The value of math for children as young as preschool age, however, was discovered before the 21st century. This is presently not a revolution but rather a potentially important step in an evolution of work that began at least a half century ago. Some…

Worksheets hold a special place among the many well-intentioned--yet ineffective--items in the early childhood and elementary toolkit. They are nearly ubiquitous in some elementary classrooms and are even popular in preschools. Parents are encouraged when they see worksheets in their children's backpacks; they see such papers as indicators that…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), with its excellent spatial resolution and ability to visualize networks of neuroanatomical structures involved in complex information processing, has become the dominant technique for the study of brain function and its development. The accessibility of in-vivo pediatric brain-imaging techniques…

Recent changes made by the Council for Professional Recognition to the Child Development Associate (CDA) credentialing program create an opportunity to redesign high school child development programs. On April 1, 2011, the Council for Professional Recognition lifted the age restriction in the CDA credentialing requirements, now allowing students…

Parents of gifted children play a powerful role in expanding their world and helping them discover what they love. When gifted children have impassioned, open-minded, and creative family members, they are free to discover what they love and who they are as people. For gifted learners, curiosity, passion, and interest are absolute essentials.…

Research with adults has demonstrated a "black sheep effect" (BSE) whereby, relative to evaluations of normative group members, ingroup deviants are derogated more than outgroup deviants. The developmental subjective group dynamics (DSGD) model holds that the BSE should develop during middle childhood when children apply wider social…

Family socioeconomic status (SES) and the quality of maternal behavior are among the few identified predictors of child executive functioning (EF), and they have often been found to have interactive rather than additive effects on other domains of child functioning. The purpose of this study was to explore their interactive effects in the…

Globally, the child-centred approach to education has influenced practitioners' views of young children as having democratic rights. A key principle of this concept is the belief that each child is unique and can only be compared in relation to their own performance. Here we employ a feminist poststructuralist approach to critique the…

The purposes of the study are to describe characteristics of the voice change in sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade choir students using Cooksey's voice-change classification system and to determine if the singing self-efficacy of adolescent males is affected by the voice change, grade level, and experience. Participants (N = 80) consisted of…

"Working theories" are described as one of the two principal outcomes of Te Whariki, the early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite its prominence as a curricular outcome, the theoretical positioning of the concept of working theory remains relatively undebated, with researchers readily attributing the term to a…

Authentic assessment approach applies naturalistic observation method to gather and analyse data about children's development that are socio-culturally appropriate to plan for individual teaching and learning needs. This article discusses the process of adapting an authentic developmental instrument for children of 3-6 years old. The instrument…

We conducted a theory-driven process evaluation of a cluster randomized controlled trial comparing two types of complementary feeding (meat versus fortified cereal) on infant growth in Guatemala, Pakistan, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We examined process evaluation indicators for the entire study cohort (N = 1236) using chi-square…