Brand names are prevalent in our society: they influence consumption and future buying behaviour. As research has shown, children are also aware of brands and brand names, and brand names learned in childhood can influence their attitude towards the known brands. The collaboration of various scientific fields including pedagogy, psycholinguistics,…

Behavioral economics concepts can advance understanding, predicting, and controlling complex human behavior. Although there have been numerous attempts to apply behavioral economics concepts to applied settings, there are a limited number of experiments conducted in educational settings. The purpose of the studies in this paper is a to apply…

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…

On November 28, 2008, Jdimytai Damour, age 34, was killed by a stampeding mob of customers running to get the day-after-Thanksgiving bargains. Even after customers in the store were informed that four people were injured and one man died, most chose to keep shopping. Looking at the root causes of this unfortunate death, it seems clear that…

Drawing upon theories that reconceptualize toys and artifacts as identity texts, this study employs mediated discourse analysis to examine children's videotaped writing and play interactions with princess dolls and stories in one kindergarten classroom. The study reported here is part of a three-year ethnographic study of literacy play in U.S.…