Much effort has been expended in developing intervention programs to help improve the early literacy and school readiness skills of young children. This article presents the results of a needs assessment project aimed at identifying priorities for community intervention programs aimed at ensuring that young children enter school ready to learn. A…

There has recently been an unprecedented focus on early years care and education, particularly on the impact of the various adults who work and play with children in the birth to five/six-years age range. Staff in early years settings have had to adapt to many changes and demands, locally and nationally, from local authorities and national…

"DaisyQuest" is a software bundle that offers computer-assisted instruction in phonological awareness, targeting children aged three to seven years. The instructional activities, framed in a fairy tale involving a search for a friendly dragon named Daisy, teach children how to recognize words that rhyme; words that have the same…

Over the course of development, the ability to switch between different tasks on the basis of feedback cues increases profoundly, but the role of performance monitoring remains unclear. Heart rate indexes can provide critical information about how individuals monitor feedback cues indicating that performance should be adjusted. In this study,…

This article aims to set out considerations resulting from international collaboration between educational thinkers in Norway and Wales concerning the proposed Foundation Phase in Wales and the Norwegian Framework Plan for Day Care Institutions, which cater for the same age of child. The essential feature of the Welsh proposal is the aim to place…

Through case-writing pedagogy, an approach to case-method instruction, early intervention-early childhood leadership students examined interdisciplinary perspectives, reflected, and integrated new content. Students explored leadership theories and researched current issues and trends in early childhood mental health as they engaged in a collegial,…

As attention shifts to how districts allocate resources to schools, student weighted allocation has emerged as an alternative to traditional staff-based allocation policies. Student-weighted allocation uses student need, rather than staff placement, as the building block of school budgeting. This article examines how the shift to student-weighted…

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) administers the nation's largest and most widely recognized accreditation system for child care centers, preschools, kindergartens, and other early childhood education programs. The standards and accreditation criteria included in this book were approved by the NAEYC Governing…

Questions of "quality" of pre- and out of school-provisions for children and their families have been raised increasingly in all modern societies since the early nineties. The appropriateness of pedagogical frameworks and approaches have not been the only issues in the debate. Other strands, for instance, have been focussing on adequate…

Until recently, pupils in The Netherlands with a developmental perspective of up to 24 months and with additional disabilities rarely made use of the educational facilities available. As a result of a new law passed in 2002, an increasing number of pupils with profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD) will attend school. Given the…

Little is known concerning how subtypes of aggression (relational and physical) might be differentially related to preschool-age children's classification in peer sociometric status groups (popular, average, rejected, neglected, and controversial). Furthermore, associations between aggression and sociometric status might vary according to the…

Providing effective services to promote development of all children is the goal of programs serving young children; this is especially important for programs that include young children who have disabilities or are at risk. Ensuring effectiveness of programming for each individual child can be difficult, and many children will need individualized…

Although there have been numerous studies investigating the predictive validity of early assessment, observed predictive validity coefficients across studies are not stable. A validity generalization study was conducted in order to answer the question of whether the relationship between early assessment of children and later achievement is…

This article introduces the suggested program standards for the next era of NAEYC accreditation and solicits comments on the proposed standards from early childhood professionals. Each standard is a global, evidence- and value-based statement that identifies performance expectations for an area of functioning in excellent early childhood programs.

To evaluate the usefulness of two DIBELS subtests (Phonemic Segmentation Fluency and Nonsense Word Fluency), 107 kindergartners and 101 first-graders who had taken the DIBELS were given a writing-of-words task and the Slosson Oral Reading Test of sight words. In addition, the 1st-graders' DIBELS included an Oral Reading Fluency subtest that…