In Jamaica, the majority of practitioners working with infants and toddlers are largely untrained. While continuing professional development (CPD) provides practitioners with the skills to meet children's needs, the provision of CPD also serves as the means by which nursery practitioners upgrade their competencies. This study presents the findings…

This study reports on a medium-scale Jamaican study, The Early Interactions Project, which measured environmental quality in 42 childcare facilities in Jamaica using Infant and Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS-3). One of the overarching goals of the project was to quantitatively measure programme quality with the goal of providing…

Early childhood education has a role to play in constructing a sustainable society. In particular, increasing global attention has focused on how early childhood may help alleviate poverty among children and their families and promote economic growth. Part of this discourse involves the use of technology as a means to improve the quality of early…

Through observations and interviews and guided by Socio-cultural Theory, this article seeks to describe how dominant approaches to parenting shape child-caregiver interactions within childcare settings. The research question that guided this study is; how do commonly held cultural assumptions about gender, discipline and the purposes of early…

Though violence in schools is a highly topical issue, very few studies have examined the issue in early years classrooms in the Caribbean. Using Jamaica and Belize as case studies, four teachers were interviewed to ascertain how they respond to children from harsh ecological environments in which they teach. Using thematic analysis, the findings…

The purpose of this research is to determine the effects of home-based programmes aimed specifically at improving developmental outcomes for preschool children from socially disadvantaged families. The authors searched the following databases between 7 October and 12 October 2010: Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (2010,…

This volume in the Language Teacher Research Series (Thomas S. C. Farrell, series editor) presents research conducted by language teachers at all levels, from high school English teachers to English language teacher educators, reflecting on their practices. The countries represented in this book are Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador,…