Divided into two volumes, "Handbook of Special Education Research" provides a comprehensive overview of critical issues in special education research. This first volume addresses key topics in theory, methods, and development, exploring how these three domains interconnect to build effective special education research. Each chapter…

Children develop fastest in their earliest years, and the skills and abilities they develop in those years lay the foundation for their future success. Similarly, early adverse experiences can contribute to poor social, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and health outcomes both in early childhood and later life. Children who grow up in families…

The years of early childhood serve as a critical opportunity not only to support the academic, physical, and social-emotional development of young children, but to demonstrate and reinforce America's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Young children benefit greatly from exposure to racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity…

Early Childhood Education (ECE) programs are an important investment in Ohio's youngest learners. Ohio has worked to increase the availability of high-quality early learning programs for preschool children by providing the Early Childhood Education grants. Funded programs deliver high-quality, comprehensive learning environments focused on healthy…

Background/Context: Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the realities of many under-resourced and conflict-affected settings posed numerous challenges for in-person early childhood education (ECE) programming. Families migrate. Classroom spaces are scarce. Transportation to and from schools can be challenging to impossible. Schooling going remote…

Children's poor social-emotional functioning has been an increasing concern prior to and amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Childhood and adolescence are critical stages of life where they acquire key cognitive and social-emotional skills that shape their future mental health. When a student's social-emotional health suffers, so do their relationships,…

Developmental assessment scales are important tools for determining developmental delays and planning preventive interventions. One broad assessment scale used to evaluate child development is the Battelle Developmental Inventories (BDIs). The BDI-2 has a standardized version in English with good psychometric properties and a translated version in…

The aim of the current study was to evaluate the relation of early childhood education global quality with children outcomes in the Greek early childhood education settings. Quality was assessed by the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R), whereas the Utrecht Early Math Competence Scale and Concepts About Print Scale were…

Classroom quality measures, such as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, Revised (ECERS-R), are widely used in research, practice, and policy. Increasingly, these uses have been for purposes not originally intended, such as contributing to consequential policy decisions. The current study adds to the recent evidence of problems with the…

An ability to detect the common location of multisensory stimulation is essential for us to perceive a coherent environment, to represent the interface between the body and the external world, and to act on sensory information. Regarding the tactile environment "at hand", we need to represent somatosensory stimuli impinging on the skin…

From an early age, most children choose to play with toys typed to their own gender. In order to identify variables that predict toy preference, we conducted a meta-analysis of observational studies of the free selection of toys by boys and girls aged between 1 and 8 years. From an initial pool of 1788 papers, 16 studies (787 boys and 813 girls)…

Working memory (WM) skills are closely associated with learning progress in key areas such as reading and mathematics across childhood. As yet, however, little is known about how the brain systems underpinning WM develop over this critical developmental period. The current study investigated whether and how structural brain correlates of…

Effortful control, or the ability to suppress a dominant response to perform a subdominant response, is an early-emerging temperament trait that is linked with positive social-emotional development. Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a single-gene disorder characterized by hallmark regulatory impairments, suggesting diminished effortful control. This…

Places assigned and places chosen have major implications for the lives of children. While the former are a result of children's subordinate position in an adult world, the latter are the essence of their agency. Beginning at a young age children seek out places to claim as their own. Places, real and imaginary, shape children and children shape…

Studies examining productive syntax have used varying elicitation methods and have tended to focus on either young children or adolescents/adults, so we lack an account of syntactic development throughout middle childhood. We describe here the results of an analysis of clause complexity in narratives produced by 354 speakers aged from four years…