The current study adopted a case study design with mixed methods to examine the multiple features in child development course syllabi in early childhood teacher education programs in two countries, China and the US. This study provided insights into the twenty syllabi through document review and questionnaires. Twenty-six participants, viewed as…

Preschool education is an education process that prepares children for primary education, provides the training and upbringing conditions in the home and also aims to remove the inequalities in terms of language and society in the early period. The audit is to evaluate learning and all the factors that affect learning and also prepare the…

International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and…

The present study took a reciprocal learning approach to examine Canadian and Chinese elementary school students' (N=40) mathematics problem posing and problem solving. Data included student performance, Skype meeting videos, meeting notes, and interviews transcripts through direct and indirect interactions between a pair of Canadian and Chinese…

The two studies examined in this paper compare the different mathematical opportunities provided in preschool classrooms in China, Japan, and the United States, with an emphasis on mathematical-themed books in classroom libraries. Study one presents the results of an online survey to examining the content of preschool classroom libraries in China…

Cognitive development and sociocultural theories support the role of play and peer cooperative problem solving (CPS) in children's learning and development; nevertheless, we still lack cross-cultural studies that investigate children's CPS during play in natural classroom contexts in early childhood. A nine-month field work including ethnographic…

Regulation of time is an important structuring tool of everyday practices in kindergarten. Despite the fundamental importance, investigation of temporal patterns have been underestimated in early childhood education research. The purpose of this article is to illuminate how ideas of childhood and children's cultural formation are embedded in the…

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their…

Classroom instruction in China and in the United States have sharp differences. Typically, constructivist learning theory shapes American classroom instruction whereas Confucian educational culture shapes Chinese classroom instruction. Furthermore, typically, Chinese classrooms adopt a direct instructional approach whereas American classrooms…

Purpose: This article examines how early childhood curriculum documents in two culturally different contexts are associated with current concepts of sustainability and principles of early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) in China and Norway. Design/Approach/Methods: Applying critical document analysis, the study explores a number of…

This study provides a comparative analysis of the pre-service education system for preschool educators in China and the United States. Based on collected data and materials (literature, policy documents, and statistical data), we compare two areas of pre-service training: (1) the formal system; (2) the informal system. In the formal system, most…

Introduction: In this paper, Spanish future primary teachers' pedagogical knowledge of numbers and operation, as revealed through their results in the TEDS-M ("Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics"), is compared with that of two other groups. The first group are the future primary teachers of other OECD countries that…

This comparative study examines the way in which preschool teachers support children's science learning in a Chinese and a Norwegian kindergarten. The study takes an ethnographic approach. Preschool teachers from one kindergarten in Shanghai and one in Bergen were asked to videotape educational activities that focused on science in their…

The purpose of this article is to carry out a critical inquiry of comparative education by using an example of a comparative programme within kindergarten teacher education in Norway. The article discusses the inclination, in cross-cultural comparative studies, to emphasise cultural essentialism, to evaluate educational practice from a…

While test anxiety has been studied extensively, little consideration has been given to the cultural impacts of children's experiences and expressions of test anxiety. The aim of this work was to examine whether variance in test anxiety scores can be predicted based on gender and cultural setting. Three hundred and ninety-eight pupils in Grade 3…