Pretend play has been claimed to be crucial to children's healthy development. Here we examine evidence for this position versus 2 alternatives: Pretend play is 1 of many routes to positive developments (equifinality), and pretend play is an epiphenomenon of other factors that drive development. Evidence from several domains is considered. For…

Early childhood education (ECE) centers are more than a series of contiguous classrooms. They are vibrant social communities where child and adult emotions are ever-present and integral to learning. Although much research has focused on classroom quality and teacher-child interactions that support children's social-emotional development,…

A phenomenological approach was used with this study to give a voice to individuals who are incarcerated for the purpose of understanding their past educational experiences in the areas of academics, personal/social, and career exploration. The study included interviews with 25 individuals who are incarcerated and who were purposefully selected to…

This study is based on a survey of public relations students and examines their attitudes, expectations, and motivations for participating in curriculum-infused service-learning projects. Results indicate that prior participation does not influence attitudes or expectations, but motivation to participate in the project was significantly associated…

There are more knowledge bases, skills, and dispositions that teachers need to have than can be covered in undergraduate music teacher education. One knowledge base that music teachers could benefit from, which is rarely covered in preservice teacher education, is social emotional learning (SEL) and techniques to implement it in their classrooms.…

Brain lesions to the white matter in peritrigonal regions, periventricular leukomalacia, in children who were born prematurely represent an important model for studying limitations on brain development. The lesional pattern is of early origin and bilateral, that constrains the compensatory potential of the brain. We suggest that (i) topography and…

This study explored the association between coaching and the implementation of the Good Behavior Game (GBG) by 129 urban elementary school teachers. Analyses involving longitudinal data on coaching and teacher implementation quality indicated that coaches strategically varied their use of coaching strategies (e.g., modeling, delivery) based on…

The purpose of this study is to measure the effect of a standard of care embedded language strategies program utilized in combination with direct language strategy instruction on the measured expressive language, cognitive development, social emotional development, and language development of prekindergarten students attending three neighborhood…

The author looks at children's play from the perspective of interpretive reproduction, emphasizing the way children create their own unique peer cultures, which he defines as a set of routines, artifacts, values, and concerns that children engage in with their playmates. The article focuses on two types of routines in the peer culture of preschool…

Little is known about how key aspects of parental migration or childrearing history affect social development across children from immigrant families. Relying on data on approximately 6,400 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, analyses assessed the role of mother's age at migration on children's social development in…

Both high-functioning autism (HFA) and social phobia (SP) involve profound social interaction deficits. Although these disorders share some similar symptoms, they are conceptualized as distinct. Because both HFA and SP are defined behaviorally, the degree of overlap between the two disorders may result in misinterpretation of symptoms. However,…

This paper starts out by describing the research and drafting processes of the "National Medium- and Long-Term Educational Reform and Development Guideline" (2010-20) (hereafter abbreviated as the "Guideline") and analyzes a series of core concepts that ran through the entire process of researching and drafting the…

Alison Gopnik, PhD, a researcher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, responds to questions about the ways researchers are discovering the complex processes of early cognitive development. Dr. Gopnik shares some of the creative research methods that are demonstrating how infants are figuring out what is going on in the mind of…

Child care is increasingly viewed as an opportunity to enhance children's development and school readiness, with prekindergarten programs and early intervention programs targeting children at different moments of development. Results of existing research are mixed, and although many children experience different child care arrangements at…

We evaluated the effects of 3 types of noncontingent auditory stimulation (music, white noise, recordings of vocal stereotypy) on 2 children with autism who engaged in high rates of vocal stereotypy. For both participants, the music condition was the most effective in decreasing vocal stereotypy to near-zero levels, resulted in the highest parent…