The Big Lift™ (Big Lift) is a preschool-third-grade collective impact initiative in San Mateo County, California. The initiative is a partnership of the County of San Mateo, San Mateo County Office of Education, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Launched in 2012, the initiative aims to boost children's reading proficiency by third grade…

Tested the hypothesis that preschool children between 2 1/2 and 6 1/2 years of age would progress though a stepwise sequence of developing ever-clearer boundaries between fantasy and reality. Findings supported the validity of the hypothesized sequence. (RH)

Examined five possible rules that children might use to interpret the terms "big" and "little." Increasing consistency in rule usage appeared to be the most significant developmental progression for children between the ages of three and five with respect to these terms. (Author/RH)

This study examined the characteristics of the child's social network as it changes within the preschool period. Of particular interest is how the social network changes as the child moves from a more home-centered existence at 3 years to a more school-centered existence at 6 years of age. Also of concern is the effect of sex and socioeconomic…

Assessed contributions of familiarity, prior experience, and age to frequency and degree of social participation of preschoolers. Normative analysis of group differences indicated that sex, age, prior peer-group experience, and familiarity did not interact and that all of them independently affected 3- and 4-year-old preschoolers' social play.…

Two studies were conducted to determine whether preschool children automatically use spatial context to aid recall of objects or whether the ability to use spatial context as a retrieval aid is a deliberate mnemonic strategy that develops later. In the first experiment, a total of 32 children (16 aged 3 and 16 aged 4) participated in a memory task…

Recent work suggests that the apparent shift from thematic to taxonomic concept organization reflects changes in children's preference for these forms of organization, rather than their capacity. A study was made to assess toddlers' knowledge of the different possible relations for the same concept and to extend the triad method to children under…

The ability of 40 children four and five years of age to discriminate reflections and rotations of visual stimuli was examined in a kinetic imagery task. Results revealed that prediction accuracy was associated with the existence of orientation markers on the stimuli, as well as age, sex, type of discrimination, and several interactions among the…

This study tested the production of 18 Spanish consonants by 120 Mexican-American preschool children (ages 3-5), to determine the age of acquisition of Spanish consonants. Data are provided on percent of correct production of each sound at six different age levels and are graphically illustrated to compare age of acquisition with another study's…

This study examined initial preferences for verb interpretation by 15 5-year-old children with specific language impairment, 15 language-matched children, and 15 age-matched children. Children indicated preferred interpretations of novel verbs from videotapes of motion and change-of-state activity scenes. Findings suggested that children's verb…

A short term longitudinal study investigated the relationship between spatial activity and spatial competencies over the course of the preschool years. A group of 22 children, 3 years of age, were observed exploring two different novel environments with their mothers: an indoor children's museum and a small outdoor zoo. When the children were 3.5…

This study examined age and sex differences in young children's skills in decoding nonverbal facial cues of emotional states. The purpose was threefold: (1) to determine whether older preschoolers were better decoders than younger preschoolers; (2) to see whether sex differences would be apparent throughout the preschool period or emerge only…

Examined sequential dependencies in solitary and interactive states of social organization as a function of age, sex, and type of toy in 12 triads of 3 1/2- and 5-year-old children. Each triad was observed during two 30-minute sessions, one in which objects with highly specific functions were available and one in which objects with relatively…

Investigates (1) whether differences between boys and girls indicated by teacher rating were similar to those indicated by direct observation and (2) whether teachers' assessments of the relative frequencies with which children show particular types of behavior agree with those obtained by direct observation. (RH)

Young and older nursery school children were taken to three locations in their school and asked to point to five targets on the school grounds. Older children were more accurate than younger children, but children's spatial representations were relatively nonintegrated at both age levels. Consistent sex differences in favor of males were found.…