Black and Latinx educators make up a critical portion of the early child education (ECE) field; 31% of the center-based workforce and about half of those employed in Head Start. These diverse educators are from communities where the impacts of the pandemic have been the most detrimental -- according to the Centers for Disease Control and…

An estimated 15 million mothers with young children in the U.S. suffer from depression. Untreated maternal depression has serious consequences for the mother's long-term health and for her child's development and functioning. it can also be costly, driving up health care use, reducing employment, and creating the need for early childhood…

Infants' understanding of a pointing gesture represents a major milestone in their communicative development. The current consensus is that infants are not capable of following a pointing gesture until 9-12 months of age. In this article, we present evidence from 4- and 6-month-old infants challenging this conclusion. Infants were tested with…

In the present study, we investigated developmental trajectories of alerting, orienting, and executive attention networks and their interactions over childhood. Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted with different samples of 6-to 12-year-old children using modified versions of the attention network task (ANT). In Experiment 1 (N = 106),…

Infants' transfer of information from pictures to objects was tested by familiarizing 9-month-olds (N = 31) with either a color or black-and-white photograph of an object and observing their preferential reaching for the real target object versus a distractor. One condition tested object recognition by keeping both objects visible, and the…

To explore the different developmental trajectories of social-communicative skills in children with autism and typically developing infants, two longitudinal studies were conducted. In Study 1, we examined the developmental sequence of social-communicative skills in 26 typically developing infants when they were 9 months old and reexamined them…

Because of their focus on psychological structures and operations, neo-Piagetian approaches to learning lend themselves to neurological hypotheses. Recent advances in neural imaging and educational technology now make it possible to test some of these claims. Here, we take a neo-Piagetian approach to mathematical learning in order to frame two…

Globalisation is often referred to as being external to education--a state of affairs presenting the modern curriculum with numerous challenges. In this article, "globalisation" is examined as something that is internal to curriculum and analysed as a "problematisation" in a Foucaultian sense, that is, as a complex of…

The Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children (HiPIC) is a developmentally appropriate parent-report measure of the Five Factor Model (FFM) that has been validated in several European languages but only recently in English. The English translation of the HiPIC was evaluated in an Australian context. Parent-rated HiPIC scores were obtained…

Although ethnic and racial identity (ERI) are central to the normative development of youth of color, there have been few efforts to bring scholars together to discuss the theoretical complexities of these constructs and provide a synthesis of existing work. The Ethnic and Racial Identity in the 21st Century Study Group was assembled for this…

This study evaluates a model for considering domain-general and domain-specific associations between teacher-child interactions and children's development, using a bifactor analytic strategy. Among a sample of 325 early childhood classrooms there was evidence for both general elements of teacher-child interaction (responsive teaching) and…

The authors examined school readiness from the parental perspective, focusing on parents' efforts and expectations for kindergarten in conjunction with their child's academic development. Using self-reported survey data from two waves of the National Household Education Surveys, the authors tested for changes in school readiness between 1993 and…

The implementation in 2009-10 of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) spearheaded the efforts of the Australian Commonwealth government to institute a national curriculum. The theme of the new early childhood framework follows three guiding concepts: Belonging, Being and Becoming. In this article, we discuss these three concepts in order to…

Background: Over the past decade or so, the idea of joining early childhood education (ECE) and schooling has gained currency in the educational reform arena. Numerous education reform proposals and plans include ECE as a component. Scores of school districts around the country have added preschool classrooms to at least some of their elementary…

Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This…