The transition to formal schooling is a large contextual change, which for many children in U.S. begins with the year of kindergarten. To better understand the challenges of this transition, the present study examines the extent to which children experience transition difficulties in five salient areas: making friends, following schedules, meeting…

The Ohio Department of Education's Office of Early Learning and School Readiness provides technical assistance and resources for their partners working with families, preschool staff, and communities to meet the individual needs of preschool children with disabilities. The goal of this manual is to offer information to preschool programs and…

The entry into kindergarten is a key transition children experience and has lasting consequences for their academic development. In light of this, many schools have implemented transition practices designed to foster positive development for children during this time. This study uses qualitative interview data to examine the policies, practices,…

This paper reports the results of a randomized controlled trial evaluating "We Have Skills," a brief curriculum designed to teach early elementary students academic and social skills as well as improve teacher efficacy in classroom management. Intervention efficacy was tested with 127 teachers, randomly assigned to condition, and 2,817…

People often think that ideas about mapping and culture are too difficult and abstract for kindergarten students, let alone English Language Learners (ELLs). This article however describes how a preservice teacher taught a three day unit in geography to her students based upon places they or their family members had visited. Many of the students…

The best Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) design challenges are student centered, with students themselves making the key decisions. But with young children who are still learning basic academic and social skills, implementing projects where they truly take the lead can be quite challenging. To give students at one…

Educational material often includes engaging perceptual information. However, this perceptual information is often extraneous and may compete with the deeper to-be-learned structure, consequently hindering either the learning of relevant structure or its transfer to new situations. This hypothesis was tested in 4 experiments in which 6- to…

The author had presented a session on poetry at a children's literature conference sponsored by The Ohio State University, and afterward two teachers invited her to come to their school and read poetry. The children emailed their responses to her shortly after she spent the entire day conducting poetry reading sessions at an elementary school in…

In this study the authors investigated whether children demonstrated the "underconfidence-with-practice" (UWP) effect. This effect is a highly robust metacognitive illusion in which adults become underconfident in their memory performance when asked to predict their memory for the same items across multiple study-test trials. One…

This study proposes to shift the current theoretical framework in which teachers practise a guarded approach regarding the touching of children in early childhood settings, towards a practice of acceptance. A brief historical context of touching is presented and supplemented with a survey of 63 currently practising K-3rd grade teachers. The survey…

Many (56%) US children aged 3-5 years are in center-based childcare and are not obtaining recommended levels of physical activity. In order to determine what child-care teachers/providers perceived as benefits and barriers to children's physical activity in child-care centers, we conducted nine focus groups and 13 one-on-one interviews with 49…

The goal of this research project is to analyse the manifestation of caring behaviours in early childhood teachers and students. Thirty-two early childhood education major pre-service teachers served as observers. For data collection they used checklists previously prepared by the classroom instructor and kept a journal with anecdotal…