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…

Over the past 200 years, early childhood provision in Germany has primarily been oriented towards the goal of work-care reconciliation. Even though there is a long tradition in Germany of education-oriented approaches, the primary goal has always been care. The extensive development of early childhood centres for children under three years of age…

Research that elucidates the complexities of gender balance is itself a controversial field. This article examines challenges and limitations in quantitative as well as qualitative research on gender balance in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Cross country comparisons of male and female participation in the ECEC workforce are often…

The ability to purposefully access, reflect, and use evidence from educational research (Educational Research Literacy) is expected of future professionals in educational practice. Based on the presented conceptual framework, a test instrument was developed to assess the different competency aspects: Information Literacy, Statistical Literacy, and…

The Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study is a polyvocal, multi-sited project on immigration and early childhood education and care in five countries: Italy, Germany, France, England and the USA. The complicated nature of the data pushed us as a group to expand our methodological resources to not only organize the data but also to make it…

Since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was ratified in 1991, children's right to have a voice, and to have their opinions heard, has led many providers and practitioners in the field of early years to seek ways to involve children's perspectives in the evaluation and development of practice. Those who value democracy understand that…

Children face many important changes in the first eight years of life, including different learning centres, social groups, roles and expectations. Their ability to adapt to such a dynamic and evolving environment directly affects their sense of identity and status within their community over the short and long term. In particular, the key turning…

Individual differences in academic success were investigated in a geographically defined whole-population sample of very preterm children with a gestational age of less than 32 weeks or a birth weight of less than 1500 gm. The sample consisted of 264 very preterm children (75.6% of German-speaking survivors) and 264 controls matched for gender,…

Close to 1,100 people attended the 55th Annual Meeting of the National Reading Conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in Miami, Florida from November 30-December 3, 2005. A record number of proposals were submitted this year (548), with 392 papers, symposia, and round tables accepted. This year's conference theme was inclusiveness and synthesis…