The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain a greater understanding of the interpersonal relationships between mentors and mentees in one early childhood, teacher-initiated, mentoring program. The mentoring program was designed to facilitate the induction process of newly-employed teachers into the university-based early childhood center.…

"Strategy" is a word that has had an increasing use in recent years. The discipline of organisational studies has adopted this concept to set out the primacy of good business practices, such as foretelling risk and opportunity. Government policy documents use the term where medium- and long-term goals are set out, for example, the New…

This paper examines Australian policy on quality for early childhood education and care (ECEC). It investigates the existing national quality assurance system, Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (QIAS) and its application in childcare centres. However, Australia's recently elected federal government has shown enormous interest in…

Young children ages 3 to 6 play a wide range of digital games, which are now available on large screens, handheld screens, electronic learning systems, and electronic toys, and their time spent with games is growing. This article examines effects of digital games and how they could be designed to best serve children's needs. A small body of…

This article describes an innovative practice in family involvement developed by one early care and education center engaged in professional development. The Hopes and Dreams Project documented family involvement in children's lives and education through the pairing of pictures and narratives about their lives, histories, priorities, goals, and…

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning…

This book overturns the typical conception of standards, empowering educators by providing concrete examples of how top-down models of assessment can be embraced and used in ways that are consistent with critical pedagogies. Although standards, as broad frameworks for setting learning targets, are not necessarily problematic, when they are…

This paper describes the use of robotics in an Early Years classroom as a tool to aid the development of technological skills in a creative environment rich with literacy and numeracy opportunities. The pilot project illustrates how a three-phase process can result in the development of: (1) emergent literacy and numeracy, (2) digital access for…

This article reports the third phase of the Froebel Research Fellowship Project: "The Voice of the Child: ownership and autonomy in early learning". Building on the first and second phases of this study, this phase examined early years practitioners' experiences of supporting young children's thinking in relation to the personal…

As neoliberal polices that emphasize governing the modern state through market-based principles expand across the globe, they are altering the training of early childhood teacher candidates. This creates a range of challenges for those teacher educators who are critical of this reform process. This article presents an instrumental case study that…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how program evaluation can be conducted and communicated in ways that meaningfully affect the education of English language learners (ELLs) in US schools. First, the paper describes the Waterford Early Reading Program Evaluation, a large-scale evaluation of a reading intervention implemented in schools with…

We investigated barriers to and facilitators of effective teacher-child interactions in voluntary pre-kindergarten programs in child care settings. An effective teacher-child interaction enables both teachers and children to actively engage in solving the problems they confront in their daily lives. The effective teacher-child interaction relies…

The Decennial Census is the most important data collection activity undertaken by the U.S. federal statistical system. Because census data are used to apportion Congress and draw redistricting lines for thousands of state and local single-member districts to meet the one-person/one-vote guidelines, the census is at the heart of the political…

This paper aims to explore the ways in which nursery workers are constructed through government discourse in England. This is done by offering a deconstruction of key policy texts. The discursive construction of "the nursery worker" within government discourses has shifted over time but currently occupies a highly politicised position.…

In 3 studies we addressed the operation of constraints on children's causal judgments. Our primary focus was whether children's beliefs about magical causality, specifically wishing, are constrained by features that govern the attribution of ordinary causality. In Experiment 1, children witnessed situations in which a confederate's wish appeared…