This paper reports on a design oriented study conducted in close collaboration between two researchers and three preschool teachers. Within this study, a play-based interview script was designed in accordance with theoretically driven principles. Based on this script, the preschool teachers conducted interviews with children from three preschools…

Preschool, understood as being both a physical and psychological environment, is, according to objectives in national curriculum, required to be inclusive for all those who attend it. Previous studies have identified the stereotypical norms of several everyday activities of preschools, including both interactions and premises. The aim of this…

Western play theories and practices have had a dominant role in creating China's current discursive condition for preschool play. They are also essential to current knowledge production about play. However, this dominance tends to be transferred into rural preschools, which have recently mushroomed and demanded play activities. The authors reflect…

Background: The forest school and nature kindergarten approach to early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been established for well over 50 years in the United Kingdom and across parts of Europe including Scandinavia. One example where the nature kindergarten approach has recently taken a foothold is the Australian 'bush kinder'. Bush…

The consideration of child-centred participation in childhood research is a topic that draws heavily on human rights, and participatory childhood research is performed in a variety of ways. The paper explores issues of adult-child roles in early childhood education with an intention to involve young children in the research as much as possible…

Lillard et al. (2013) have done a thorough review of published pretend play research from the past 50 plus years. However, they did not thoroughly address the reasons why this body of research has such flaws as well as the contradictory or minimal findings that call into question strongly held views and published assertions regarding the…

We need methods to measure friendship among very young children to study the beginnings of friendship and the impact of experiences with friendship for later development. This article presents an overview of methods for measuring very young children's friendships. A behavioural sociometric method was constructed to study degrees of friendship…

Research Findings: Big Math for Little Kids (BMLK) is a mathematics curriculum developed for use with 4- and 5-year-old children. To investigate the BMLK curriculum's effect on children's mathematics knowledge, this cluster-randomized controlled trial randomly assigned child care centers to provide mathematics instruction to children, using either…

Starting with the research question "What is the role of play as a means of genuine inclusion of home language and cultural traditions in an intercultural early learning programme?", the article focuses on the role of cultural artefacts in a programme in which the majority of the children were refugees from Africa. The sociocultural…

The purpose of this article was to describe a taxonomy of pretend play for children with disabilities based on a systematic review of the literature to characterize pretend play. Thirty-seven studies were identified as measuring pretend play in children with disabilities. Several inconsistencies were found in the measurement of pretend play across…

In this literature review, we examined 30 years of play-literacy inquiry through a quantitative lens in order to identify, assemble and summarize studies of sufficient methodological strength to form a corpus of research that encourages meta-analytic thinking. First, a multi-phase search of the literature was conducting yielding 192 studies that…

Researchers who use video to record interactions usually need to translate the video data into another medium at some stage in order to facilitate its analysis and dissemination. This article considers some methodological issues that arise in this process by examining transcripts, diagrams and pictures as examples of different techniques for…

This article is a reflection on the author's M.Ed. research study, undertaken whilst working full time as a nursery teacher, in which she explores her concerns and the moments of illumination through the research process. She reflects on ways she began to make sense of young children's learning, using some key moments in the study, which examined…