Research Findings: We assessed socio-emotional behavior, nonverbal reasoning, German receptive language, and motor skills of refugee children attending early childhood development [ECD] programs and of those who did not (N = 207, mean age = 69.4 months). Young refugee children overall demonstrated lower levels of development and more…

Children's white matter development is driven by experience, yet it remains poorly understood how it is shaped by attending formal education. A small number of studies compared children before and after the start of formal schooling to understand this, yet they do not allow to separate maturational effects from schooling-related effects. A clever…

Background: Perceptual motor development is crucial during early childhood and not properly addressing it in physical education (PE) can be detrimental. Aim: To determine the effect of a South African curriculum-aligned PE intervention on the visual-motor integration (VMI), visual perception (VP) and motor coordination (MC) of 6-year-old children.…

Given the hegemony of developmentalism in early childhood education and care, this article uses a poetic juxtapositional approach to bewilder Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Critical consideration of how the theory of cognitive development has contributed to the imagining of a universal, ahistorical child and childhood(s) are discussed…

This study focused on associations between children's socioemotional development (prosocial behaviour, internalizing and externalizing problems) and parenting styles (affection, behavioural control, and psychological control), and the moderating role of children's social withdrawal (as a temperamental characteristic) in these associations.…

"I think I can, I think I can' puffed "The Little Engine That Could." The American folktale taught the value of optimism and hard work reflecting a growth mindset belief about abilities. A growth mindset positively impacts academic achievement, motivation, and children's agency for learning. Few studies have explored how early…

Teachers have the ability to influence a child's sense of belonging and peer relationships in the classroom which are important for a child's social development. Currently, little is known about the ways in which they do this. Vygotsky's concept of the social situation of development and Hedegaard's model for learning and development were used to…

Executive functions (EF) are domain-general cognitive skills that predict foundational academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. However, less is known about the relation between EFs and science achievement. The nature of this relation might be explained by the theory of mutualism, which states that development is the result of complex and…

Parental education and child gender are related to learning and development during childhood and adolescence. The present study investigated the role of mother's education level and child gender for children's vocabulary and math skills in Norway. Children's vocabulary and math skills were assessed in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)…

This paper used a nationally representative sample of children from the United States to examine the extent to which physical activity and sports participation may promote growth in children's executive functions (EFs), attention, and social self-control over time. Using data from the ECLS-K:2011 (N = 18,174), findings indicated that regular…

Guided by evolutionary-developmental models, this study tested the hypothesis that children's exposure to parental relationship instability, defined by initiation and dissolution of caregiver intimate relationships, has both costs in cognitive impairments and benefits in enhanced learning skills. Participants included 243 mothers and their…

Responding to concerns that play is at risk in the early years of education, this article investigates teachers' current use of play in language and literacy instruction in Grade 1 and 2 Alberta classrooms. It addresses what teachers say they need to make play part of school-based language and literacy education. Survey findings show a recognition…

Differentiation hypotheses concern changes in the structural organization of cognitive abilities that depend on the level of general intelligence (ability differentiation) or age (developmental differentiation). Part 1 of this article presents a review of the literature on ability and developmental differentiation effects in children, revealing…

Districts across the country are using Preschool to Third Grade (P-3) approaches to address long-standing barriers to achieving positive outcomes for young children, for example by helping increase children's readiness for elementary school. P-3 approaches are promising for realizing these results because they demand investments in the systems…

The current quantitative study, a naturalistic field experiment, was conducted in a public primary school in Soweto, Johannesburg, with the objective to examine how children's achievement on four assessments at the beginning of Grade R, namely their numeracy, their mathematics-specific vocabulary, their executive functions, and their logical…