This article examines the benefits and disadvantages of participation in organized youth sports and describes a youth development approach to sports programming. The authors summarize what is known about the physical, socioemotional, and cognitive benefits of sports participation. These include health benefits (for example, a reduction in heart…

One of the aims of Educational Guidance is social development and learning in Secondary Education students who are in multicultural contexts. An increase in socio-emotional competencies is promoted through Guidance program interventions. The "Guidance Program for Socio-emotional Competencies" (in Spanish, "POCOSE") not only improves students'…

Social skill development is one of the primary areas of intervention for young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The purpose of this article was to conduct a retrospective review of social skills intervention research for preschool children with ASD. A review of 17 single-subject design studies from twelve journals (1999-2006) was…

We examined the role of the teacher-child relationship quality (close, dependent, and conflictive) on preschoolers' (N=95) academic readiness for kindergarten, and we tested children's prosocial and aggressive behavior and peer group exclusion as mediators of this relation. A unique feature of this study is the ethnically and socio-economically…

Communities in the UK are seeing a sustained shift in the balance of care of babies and the youngest children from families to nurseries, with a particular emphasis being placed on early learning. Yet a basic question of whether nurseries should be modelled on the intimacy and spontaneity of family interactions or the more professional and planned…

Socio-emotional skills are highly prized on the labour market these days; many writers say that competencies of this type help to increase individuals' employability, but educational institutions consistently forget their responsibility for providing training in them. Most jobs call not only for knowledge and specific technical competencies, but…

The relationship between symbolic play and other domains, such as degree of autistic symptomatology, nonverbal cognitive ability, receptive language, expressive language, and social development, was investigated. The assessment files of 101 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder were studied. Nonverbal cognitive ability and expressive language…

This study aimed to investigate the relationships between abilities to initiate and respond to joint attention and symptoms of autism that have, and have not, been theoretically linked to joint attention. Participants were 51 boys and five girls with autistic disorder, aged between 2 years and 6 years 5 months. Measures of joint attention…

A rating scale is developed for preschool classrooms to assess the physical environment's role in children's development of cognitive and social competency. The scale is tested in 98 classrooms, and children are assessed on two measures of competency in a subsample of these classrooms. Findings indicate that the physical environment is related to…

"Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators" is the authoritative source for accurate and relevant information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances, and performance of education systems in more than 40 countries, including OECD members and G20 partners. Featuring more than 100 charts, 200…

Social relationships should not be considered merely as the way individuals get along with others. Interaction with others plays a crucial part in the social development of children in terms of how they interpret words, gestures and attitudes of others toward themselves. Every social interaction holds messages that children interpret as enforcing…

This study presents a dynamic systems model that suggests that social behavior emerges from the self-organization of cognition-emotion relationships and becomes stable through a process of positive feedback and coupling of components over time. Five 10- to 12-year-old children identified as anxious in evaluative situations by their teacher were…

This paper reviews the social origins of students' development of self-regulatory skill, with special emphasis on observational learning through peer modeling. A social cognitive perspective on self-regulation is presented. In this view students' academic competence develops initially from social sources of academic skills and subsequently shifts…

This very brief paper considers the importance of positive social development for gifted children. It stresses the need for these children to interact with true peers, that is others with whom they can interact at an equal level around issues of common interest. Development of leadership skills and self-esteem is seen to be fostered by…

Elderly men (N=18) and elderly women (N=18) were assigned to three treatment conditions: feedback, practice, or control. Subjects were post-tested on measures of spatial egocentrism, fluid intelligence, perceptual speed, and volume conservation. The effect of feedback was to improve scores on spatial egocentrism, but this influence did not…