In this study, we make the case for using texts children create as part of their play as a means for assessing their developing print literacy knowledge. We assessed 4- and 5-year-old children's authentic texts using categories and criteria from the "Assessing Young Children's Marks/Drawing/Print" tool, a research-based, classroom…

In a large rural region in a southeastern state in the United States, many children are not proficient in one to three areas of school readiness, including self-regulation, social skills, and mathematics. Although evidence exists that parents' perspectives about school readiness influence kindergarten preparedness, the problem that was the focus…

When novice music educators abandon their expressed dedication to forward-looking ideas like equity, epistemological distinctions between belief and knowledge, or lack of such distinctions, may influence such action. Political philosopher Russell Hardin argued that it makes sense for people to hold false, conflicting, and even extreme beliefs.…

In the global context, male participation in early childhood education is notably low, with only 3% of the workforce in mainland China comprising male professionals. This study delves into the intrinsic motivation of male kindergarten teachers, employing the framework of self-determination theory. Qualitative research, comprising face-to-face…

In order to explore the development mechanism of construction theory in the field of moral judgment, this study investigated the influence of age and social distance on such moral expectations in positive moral context and negative moral context. In both positive and negative moral contexts, 5-6-year-old children had the highest moral expectations…

Purpose: This study investigates the fairness preference of five-year-old children in Shanghai, observing their distributive behaviors in both stakeholder and spectator games and showing how this behavior is linked to their family background. Design/Approach/Methods: Participants had to make distributive choices in two experiments and distribute…

In Germany, there is still a great need for research on the quality of teacher-child interactions in ECEC institutions. Especially, because social interactions and relationships are crucial for (early) learning and development (Ulferts et al., 2019). However, there are hardly any results on factors influencing the interaction quality. This paper…

Research suggests that metacommunication in young children's social pretend play is the most complex form of cooperation. In this study, metacommunication was examined using audio and video recordings during pretend play. Participants were 24 children in kindergarten average age 5.1 years. Utterances were coded for metacommunication, the narrative…

Perceiving a calling toward one's career can provide kindergarten teachers sufficient internal motivation to resist massive job burnout and obtain high-level performance and well-being. Given the important role of leadership on followers' career calling, the present study takes the multilevel approach to examine the cross-level impact of…

Wordless picture book reading is one of the common literacy practices for young children that happen at schools and homes. This dissertation of three studies explores the reader-text transactions between young children and wordless picture books in three ways: a content analysis of wordless books potentially featuring characters of color, a…

The present work intends to analyse how pre-school aged children experience the re/construction of a 'gender identity' and the processes that create it as an essential, factual, and unchangeable reality -- therefore, suspect. Given the growing importance of 'gender identity development' in child development literature, as well as the arising…

This article investigates how young multilingual children's mathematics learning is connected to their language use, lived experiences, contexts, and emotions. To this end, we consider the experiences of children who used both Spanish and English to learn mathematics. We center on two instances of kindergarten children counting and use Systemic…

The purpose of this article is to examine how the discourse of childhood innocence masks the ways in which sexual violence by boys against girls is perpetrated in kindergarten. Findings from a year-long ethnographic study conducted in two Canadian kindergarten classrooms show that narrow understandings of gender and sexuality in childhood obscure…

Programming activities have the potential to provide a rich context for exploring measurement units in early elementary mathematics. This study examines how a small group of young children (ages 5-6) express their emergent conception of a dynamic linear unit and the measurement concepts they found challenging. Video of an introductory programming…

Dual language immersion (DLI) programs have emerged in the U.S. as effective ways to bring together language minority and language majority speakers in school settings with the goal of bilingualism and bi-literacy for all. However, the proliferation of these programs has raised concerns regarding issues of inequity and dissimilar power dynamics in…