Many Aboriginal students face extraordinary challenges as they enter and move through the school system. The risk associated with poverty plays a large role in an Aboriginal child's early childhood development, including delayed cognitive and social development. As well, many Aboriginal students feel the neglect of their cultural heritage and the…

Empirical evidence suggests a correlation between motivation and reading achievement as well as a decline in motivation as students progress through the grades. In order to address this issue, it is necessary to determine the instructional methods that promote motivation and identity development in reading. This study examines the motivation and…

As children's digital lives become more relevant to schools and educators, the question of play and learning is being revisited in new and interesting ways. "Children's Virtual Play Worlds: Culture, Learning, and Participation" provides a more reasoned account of children's play engagements in virtual worlds through a number of scholarly…

Policymakers need to decide how to invest in strengthening the most basic foundation for early childhood development: family relationships. The challenges: (1) help parents provide the responsive and stimulating environments that will prepare young children for school; and (2) support fathers' engagement with their children regardless of whether…

As expectations for early childhood education (ECE) increase, there is a corresponding need for effective leadership in classrooms, programs, and the organizations that form the field's infrastructure. A recent study examined how the ECE field is addressing its need for leadership by focusing attention on the leadership development programs…

The Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) is commonly used to inform diagnoses of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Considering the time dedicated to using the ADI-R, it is of interest to expand the ways in which information obtained from this interview is used. The current study examines how algorithm totals reflecting past (ADI-Diagnostic)…

This paper reviews the literature on early child development among Koreans, with a focus on autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The literature review of 951 abstracts in English, 101 abstracts in Korean and 27 full articles published from 1994 to 2011 was performed to understand the presentation of and response to ASD in Korean culture. Based on…

The current study investigated early temperament in 54 infants at familial high-risk of ASD and 50 controls. Parental report of temperament was assessed around 7, 14 and 24 months of age and diagnostic assessment was conducted at 3 years. The high-risk group showed reduced "Surgency" at 7 and 14 months and reduced "Effortful Control" at 14 and 24…

This paper critically evaluates the ways we look to children to educate us and explores how we might depart from that dynamic, exploring how a range of conceptual frameworks from historical and cultural studies and psychoanalysis might contribute to understanding the problematic of childhood, its problems and its limitations. While "child as…

Parents are often the first to recognize early signs of developmental challenges, launching the family into an unanticipated journey that sometimes resolves quickly but sometimes not. Development depends on nurturing relationships that provide the necessary experiences to allow the child to develop. Equally important are the relationships that…

The purposes of this paper are to highlight the foundations of multilevel construct validation, describe two methodological approaches and associated analytic techniques, and then apply these approaches and techniques to the multilevel construct validation of a widely-used school readiness measure called the Early Development Instrument (EDI;…

From the moment children say "mine!" by two years of age, objects of possession change progressively from being experienced as primarily unalienable property (i.e., something that is absolute or nonnegotiable), to being alienable (i.e., something that is negotiable in reciprocal exchanges). As possession begins to be experienced as alienable, the…

A mother tracked her preschooler's number word development daily from 18 to 49 months of age. Naturalistic observations were supplemented with observations during structured (Kumon) training and microgenetic testing. The boy's everyday use of "two" did not become highly reliable and selective for 10 months (at 28 months), emerged later than that…

To investigate the interaction between segmental and supra-segmental stress-related information in early word learning, two experiments were conducted with 20- to 24-month-old English-learning children. In an adaptation of the object categorization study designed by Nazzi and Gopnik (2001), children were presented with pairs of novel objects whose…

Most research on children's conception of death has probed their understanding of its biological aspects: its inevitability, irreversibility and terminal impact. Yet many adults subscribe to a religious conception implying that death marks the beginning of a new life. Two recent empirical studies confirm that in the course of development, children…