Children of elementary school age are in the process of discovering and establishing their self-identity through talk, gesture, writing, and, especially, the arts. While they can sometimes find room to exert their individuality in their daily classroom assignments, it is more often in the spaces open to social interaction in school in which this…

Only when we look at education from birth and follow the inner development of the child from the beginning can we truly see the child's psychological progress. Montessori states that personality cannot develop fully without freedom; even the formation of healthy social life requires freedom to associate, not coercion. The early childhood level…

This article reviews the process and achievements of leadership of an improvement and development programme for children's centres in the context of public value and Ofsted inspection. It analyses how the capacity has been developed of children's centre managers to work more strategically and collectively. Distributed leadership theory is applied…

The conceptions early childhood educators (ECEs) hold about infants can guide their pedagogical practices in ways that can enable and constrain infants' experiences. Literature regarding infants' development and the role of adults in infant learning theoretically positions infants as both being capable of independent learning, and needing adult…

The authors argue that childhood played a special role in the cultural-historical theory of human culture and biosocial development made famous by Soviet psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky and his circle. Th?ey discuss how this school of thought has, in turn, influenced contemporary play studies. Vygotsky used early childhood to test and refi?ne his…

Allocentric spatial memory, the memory for locations coded in relation to objects comprising our environment, is a fundamental component of episodic memory and is dependent on the integrity of the hippocampal formation in adulthood. Previous research from different laboratories reported that basic allocentric spatial memory abilities are reliably…

What is the developmental course of children's gender constancy? Do other cognitive abilities such as time comprehension and false-belief understanding foster gender constancy and the subcomponents gender stability and gender consistency? We examined the development of gender constancy and its relation to time comprehension and false-belief…

Rigorous DAP (developmentally appropriate practices) is a set of 11 principles of instruction intended to help close early childhood learning gaps. Academically rigorous learning environments create the conditions for children to learn at high levels. While academic rigor focuses on one dimension of education--academic--DAP considers the whole…

Considering that most educators think it is essential to help children attain meaningful, emotionally satisfying lives, teaching should start with developing ways of being that lead to healthy personal development. Teaching mindfulness--practices that focus and calm one's mind--is a key foundation of such development, according to the authors, who…

There is no gainsaying the fact that Early Childhood Education generally, and preschool education in particular, is faced with myriad of problems in Nigeria. Scholars, government agencies and nongovernmental organisations have been struggling to find lasting solutions to these problems but the successes recorded have been quite insignificant. This…

Non-marital childbearing is associated with many adverse outcomes for both the mother and the child. Most of these births are unintended. If these unintended births could be reduced it might improve children's prospects by enabling their mothers to get more education, earn more, and wait to have children within marriage. In this brief, the authors…

This qualitative study design utilizes embedded instruction with a constant comparative approach to explore the personal epistemologies of preschool children during peer focus groups. Personal epistemology is an individual's belief about knowledge and knowing, and little is known about early onset of epistemological development. This case study…

We have developed a software-based tool to support a dynamic micro-simulation model of life-course development (to age 13) as an aid to policy makers assessing the impact of policies affecting children. We demonstrate how this approach bridges the research-policy gap by creating: (1) an easy transfer of evidence in a form that policymakers can use…

Handedness for acquiring objects was assessed monthly from 6 to 14 months in 328 infants (182 males). A group based trajectory model identified 3 latent groups with different developmental trajectories: those with an identifiable right preference (38%) or left preference (14%) and those without an identifiable preference (48%) but with a…

The capacity to ascribe goals and intentions to others is a fundamental step in child cognitive development. The aim of the present study was to assess the age at which these capabilities are acquired in typically developing children. Two experiments were carried out. In the first experiment, 4 groups of children (age range = 3 years 2 months-7…