Young children's play is highly multimodal, with gesture, gaze, movement and speech often combined simultaneously in collaborative meaning-making. This article argues for a multimodal social semiotic perspective on play, recognising that this requires representation of data that brings multimodal elements into careful consideration. In this…

The first year writing "jumbo" is a large enrollment composition course with ninety students and nine embedded writing mentors. The "jumbo" structure "emerged from an 'entanglement' of the institutional environment and intentional innovation" (Jaxon). Currently taught with a human rights focus, but with other…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of basic tennis education on stress and assertiveness levels among middle school students. Material: The study group consisted of a total of 120 students, 60 females and 60 males, aged 9-11 years. The Rathus Assertiveness Schedule and the Perceived Stress Scale for Children were used as…

Game-based learning (GBL) has increasingly been used to promote students' learning engagement. Although prior GBL studies have highlighted the significance of learning engagement as a mediator of students' meaningful learning, the existing accounts failed to capture specific evidence of how exactly students' in-game actions in GBL enhance learning…

Background: This study was designed to develop a program to increase the confidence level among kindergarten teachers to teach handwriting in kindergarten. Methods: A pretest-posttest quasi-experimental research design was utilized. Five teachers employed at the kindergarten center in a school district in Illinois participated in the study. Data…

This study examines young speakers' language use in the bidialectal context of Cyprus. It focuses on children's language use of their two language varieties, namely Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek, and how they are being socialised to use these two varieties in the classroom environment and at home. The data collected from kindergarten…

This paper is part of a wider research project, exploring the possibilities to protect and extend Froebelian principles in practice and analyses interview data from thirty-three early years practitioners to investigate their understanding and enactment of learning through play in relation to the theories of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852). Analysis…

This essay relies on methods of narrative research to both present and consider an example of a second-wave of critical whiteness pedagogy in K-12 contexts. The author focuses on his interactions with one high school student -- Adam -- to theorize how "The Whiteness Project" allowed students to "play with whiteness" in…

Out-of-school making and engineering programmes that are frequently positioned as playful have increased dramatically in recent years -- but how appropriate is the framing of play for engagement in these informal STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) spaces? Drawing on data from two research sites located in the UK, including…

This study was intended to examine the relationship between children's shyness and play behaviour during peer play, and the moderating effect of the level of children's language development. Participants were 229 South Korean children aged 48-53 months. The results of the study are as follows. Children's shyness was negatively associated with…

Phonics continues to be one of the most controversial literacy instruction topics debated in the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Given the importance placed on phonics in early literacy learning and the role that teacher beliefs play in the types of code-related literacy children encounter, the purpose of this two phase mixed-methods study…

This article reports an empirical study that explores gender differences in both cooperative and collaborative social gaming in relation to achievements and attitudes. Another aim was to compare students' game attitudes, feelings toward group work, and achievements in cooperative versus collaborative digital game-based learning environments. One…

Early childhood settings value play as the way young children learn and educators encourage children's re-enactment of cultural practices in the imaginative play spaces provided. From a cultural-historical perspective, children expect these imaginative play spaces to contain objects from their social contexts, but what happens when technologies…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of adapted play activities on physical fitness in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this study, the pretest-posttest design with a single experimental group was used. The sample of the study is comprised of 7 students with 7-13 years of age. In the measurement of physical…

The purpose of this research is to examine cultural difference in Turkish and American preschoolers' play, aggression and victimization behaviours. The research has been performed in a nursery school affiliated to a university in one of the big cities of Turkey and in two nursery schools affiliated to a university in one of the Northern states of…