This study investigated the direct relationship between home play opportunity and prospective school readiness, and the indirect relationships as mediated through object and social mastery motivation among Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children. Participants were 106 local children (44.4% girls, mean age = 60.0 months) and their parents and…

The early development of spatial reasoning skills has been linked to future success in mathematics (Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009), but research to date has mainly focused on the development of these skills within classroom settings rather than at home. The home environment is often the first place students are exposed to, and develop, early…

Drawing from a network case study, this article traces enactments of a letter writing enquiry in one Kindergarten public school classroom in New York City, and in doing so, explores both the affordances and limitations of sociomaterial approaches employed by the researcher towards school literacies. Looking down at one morning meeting revealed…

How do assumptions about where children naturally belong reinforce colonial productions of the human? This paper presents research from a study examining how North American Waldorf educators navigated the colonial legacies of common-sense understandings of childhood. I focus on the ideas about childhood that emerge in a belief that Waldorf…

Each year, SC TEACHER administers the SC Teacher Exit Survey to public K-12 classroom teachers who are not renewing their teaching contracts. The survey is designed to offer insights into how working conditions and other factors relate to teachers' decisions to either teach in another school district or leave the classroom. This report highlights…

Background: The most effective approach to food allergy management is to avoid consuming the specific allergens that trigger an allergic reaction. It is crucial to make school environments prepared for the potential of food allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, which is a rare but documented outcome. The high prevalence of anaphylactic…

Innovations, such as novel evidence-based practices, are not likely to diffuse to practice without explicit effort and design (Rogers, 2003). In an effort to understand how interventions should be designed to meet teacher preferences, the present study utilized a full-profile two-alternative forced-choice experiment to examine teacher preferences…

The role of play in early elementary education (K-2) generates dichotomous opinions, and more research is required to support efficacious pedagogical decision-making. This pilot study explored the effects of pedagogical approaches on Title I kindergarten students' executive function (EF) to test the hypothesis that children, especially those from…

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…

Play, of varied type and form, provides opportunities for children to acquire a sense of competence and belonging when engaging in classroom life. The purpose of this study was to investigate ways that the inclusion of play as a curricular component eased academic stressors and supported motivation during the transition to kindergarten. In this…

In the Maltese context, the nation-wide roll-out of State kindergarten provision in the mid-70s and the rapid increase in childcare services for under three-year-olds over the last two decades were initiatives driven by efforts to entice women to the labour market. National research to determine short and long-term effects which these services…

Parent involvement in early childhood education has been researched extensively in many countries around the world. However, there is a lack of research on this topic in Jordan, as well as in Arab countries in general. The current study sought to explore the views of Jordanian parents on their involvement in their children's education.…

There is a tendency in European education policy to emphasise more and better deliberate learning outcomes. The tendency is criticised for taking an instrumental view of education [Biesta, G. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement: "Ethics, politics, democracy." Routledge,; van Manen, M. (2008). Pedagogical sensitivity and…

The Anthropocene is a geo-stratigraphic unit of the upper Earth's layers, impacted by human disturbances, but also humankind's historical record, and children's place to live on. It is an unfinished narrative. This study explores how garden and soil-related activities with kindergarten children, guided by well-informed teachers, may have the…

The teaching and learning of design technology that occurs in nature-based early childhood education and care (ECEC) contexts such as nature kindergartens remains under-theorised. There is a growing body of scholarship that describes how teaching and learning occurs in these contexts as well as highlighting the benefits for young children learning…