During their kindergarten placements, teacher candidates are learning to teach with young children who may be experiencing linguistic and racial hierarchies in a formal institutional setting for the first time. The purpose of this research is to understand how teacher candidates make sense of the socially constructed boundaries of language and…

Young children bring rich social, cultural, and political knowledge to school, cultivated in their homes and communities. This knowledge, ranging from household skills to multilingual practices, is often marginalized in schools that value different norms. Drawing from ethnographic studies in Illinois and New York kindergarten classrooms, this…

While much research has examined the role of individual and systemic racial bias in driving racial discipline disparities, less work has considered the significance of curricular environments in school discipline patterns. In this paper, I report on an ethnographic study of three kindergarten classrooms. Adopting a critical sociocultural…

The aim of the study is to determine experiences of children attending a preschool class and their teacher about class rules, desirable and undesirable behaviors and strategies followed by the teacher concerning these behaviors. The study is a case study, which is one of the qualitative research methods. The participants were 14 children attending…

Recent study on gender representation in children's literature has focused on the representations themselves, while there is less research regarding how children talk about these depictions in texts. Our work, a qualitative study of how kindergarten-aged children discuss gender during picture book read-alouds, examined how children drew on the…

Early learning centers are springing up rapidly in China. However, parents are confronted with high prices and difficulty in assessing the effectiveness of early enrichment programs (EEPs). This study was driven by this phenomenon and aimed to investigate parental decision-making processes of buying EEPs from a social media perspective. We sampled…

First-order and advanced theory of mind (ToM and AToM), and their structures and relations were investigated in 229 children aged 5-8 years. ToM was assessed using 6 tasks from the first-order ToM scale, while AToM was measured using an 18-item battery (higher-order false-belief understanding; strange stories; faux pas test; eyes test;…

The study explored the nature of mother-child conversation during and after a shared book reading (SBR) interaction and how it relates to children's social understanding and prosocial behavior. Participants were 61 mother-child dyads (children's mean age 5 years, 8 months) from low socioeconomic strata (SES). Mother-child SBR and their…

Many children come to kindergarten with insufficient social skills to participate in the activities necessary for academic achievement. Children enrolled in prekindergarten programs across the United States are expelled at higher rates than older students. Boys are expelled 4 1/2 times more often than girls. When children excluded from…