This study aims to enhance our knowledge of the associations between the quality of the language-learning environment in toddler childcare groups and children's vocabulary development from age 3 to age 5. Participants were 1,131 children (48% girls; age at T1 assessment: M = 35.5 months, SD = 2.7; age at T2 assessment: M = 60.3 months, SD = 1.4)…

The main objective of the present study was to evaluate the efficacy of peer training in pivotal response treatment (PRT) for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in their first year of school. Four 6-year-old boys with ASD and eight typically developing (TD) children (aged 4-6 years) participated in the study. A non-concurrent…

The purpose of this document is to briefly introduce the research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and trauma and their relevance to schools. ACEs are acute or chronic events that threaten the child's physical or emotional well-being. This brief answers the following questions: (1) What are ACEs? (2) How common are ACEs? (3) What is trauma?…

Purpose: This article was intended to share and reflect on experiences concerning the education for sustainable development (ESD) project at Hongqiao Kindergarten in Shanghai. The project aimed to explore how ESD could be implemented in a current curriculum and to provide useful examples of educational activities and experiences.…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the listening effort made by young children in real classrooms during a prolonged speech reception task in the presence of background noise. Method: The experiment was proposed to 117 typically developing kindergarten and primary school pupils, aged 5-7 years old. An ecological experimental approach was…

The current study focuses on the cumulative effect on children's early learning outcomes of the quality of teacher-child interactions over multiple years during early childhood. Using propensity score matching to minimize selection bias, we compared the academic outcomes of children who experienced consistently high-quality or consistently…

What should parents of gifted young learners expect to see in the early grades? How can parents be supportive, yet advocate for their child's needs? After 25 years of working with parents of young children, the author offers some candid advice: Be kind, be gentle, and be relentless in the pursuit of challenge for the child. In this article the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine how context shapes leaders' caring approach in ways that influence organizational learning and the cultivation of professional capital. Design/methodology/approach: This exploratory study draws on case study data from two schools. Within each school, the authors draw primarily on semi-structured…

Based on a government document review, 25 stakeholder interviews, and 7 site visits, we examined how and why outdoor play became a focus of Scottish policy for early learning and care programs; we also documented opportunities and barriers to policy implementation. The outdoor play emphasis began as a bottom-up initiative, with a few early…

The introduction to this Special Topic Collection has two parts. To provide background and context for the articles in the collection, Part 1 tells the story of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study program at the National Center for Education Statistics. It offers an abridged history of this program and describes the designs of the two national…

Research Findings: Home literacy practices are an important variable in the development of literacy skills among children. However, several questions regarding the relationship between home literacy practices and writing are unanswered. The objective of this correlational study is to examine the relationship between reading-related and…

This study shows that home literacy activities contribute to kindergarten children's higher-level comprehension processes, namely knowledge integration and knowledge access. Kindergarten children completed measures assessing literacy and language skills and then their performances on these measures were correlated with home literacy activities,…

Families raising young children diagnosed with multiple disabilities encounter experiences that are often unique and extend well beyond the early childhood years due to the intensity and severity of their child's needs. The contexts of these families must be understood to provide meaningful services and supports, particularly during the child's…

Equitable instruction is reflected in how students are positioned in the classroom and how their identities evolve through purposeful interactions that value and recognize the intellectual capacity of each student. In this article, the authors describe how a kindergarten teacher planned and facilitated a geometry lesson that attended to the…

To relieve young children of a burden and to encourage informal literacy practices such as shared book reading, the Chinese Ministry of Education implemented an early education policy that forbids the teaching of formal literacy (e.g., Chinese character recognition and Pinyin) as well as more ambitious literacy teaching practices (e.g., Teaching…