The transition to school is a critical period for children and families. Successful transition predicts later school achievement and socio-emotional outcomes with sustained long-term benefits. Educational disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic meant that support for the transition of children from nursery to school was limited. The study…

Self-regulation is an essential ability of children to cope with various developmental challenges. This study examines the developmental interplay between emotional and behavioral self-regulation during childhood and the relationship with academic achievement using data from the longitudinal Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Using cross-lagged panel…

This research project uses the methods of Crowder and Callinan and Sharp to assess year one children's (age 5-6) personal understanding of scientific concepts. This research project uses video recording as a primary resource of data collection within a case study approach using a participant observer method. Analysis supports the work of Crowder…

Introduction: This paper investigates techniques used by children in year 4 (age eight to nine) of a UK primary school to reformulate their queries, and how they use information retrieval systems to support query reformulation. Method: An in-depth study analysing the interactions of twelve children carrying out search tasks in a primary school…

This study of 4- to 6-year-olds had 2 aims: first, to determine how lower level comprehension skills (receptive vocabulary and grammar) and verbal memory support early higher level comprehension skills (inference and literal story comprehension), and second, to establish the predictive power of these skills on subsequent reading comprehension.…

Young children are frequently exposed to sounds such as speech and music in noisy listening conditions, which have the potential to disrupt their learning. Missing input that is masked by louder sounds can, under the right conditions, be "filled in" by the perceptual system using a process known as perceptual restoration. This experiment…

Both sensitivity to speech rhythm and non-speech rhythm have been associated with successful phonological awareness and reading development in separate studies. However, the extent to which speech rhythm, non-speech rhythm and literacy skills are interrelated has not been examined. As a result, five- to seven-year-old English-speaking children…

This paper presents findings from a qualitative UK study exploring the social practices of schoolchildren visiting an interactive science discovery centre. It is promoted as a place for "learning through doing", but the multi-modal, ethnographic methods adopted suggest that children were primarily engaged in (1) sensory pleasure-taking…

In the UK there is much concern about the educational progress of children from areas of significant social disadvantage entering primary school with impoverished language skills. These children are not routinely referred to speech and language therapy services and therefore education practitioners in schools deliver intervention to facilitate…

Treiman and Cassar (1996) argued that young children are capable of assembling spellings from their constituent morphemes. The present study aims to replicate the methodology used by Treiman and colleagues to investigate whether young children in the UK are using morphological spelling strategies. Eighty-three children between five and nine years…

In this article, the author presents the challenges faced by early childhood education in 29 countries, according to the World Forum National Representatives and Global Leaders for Young Children. The countries represented in these responses include: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Fiji, India, Iran, Iraq, Japan,…

In this paper I argue that children have a right to basic numeracy and that studies of adult numeracy suggest that this right is being denied to many in British schools. Because of the way that maths education discourses are structured, we do not have a separately defined discourse around numeracy teaching, and this has implications for young…

That young children need space seems an unsurprising statement. So unsurprising that it scarcely needs further examination, to say nothing of further thought. But what is really meant by "space" when considered in the context of young children in school and their developing needs? Various studies have mostly described the actual physical…

Drawing on existing work in the area of creativity and early years education, this paper maps the process of an exploratory study which sought to identify what characterizes "possibility thinking" as an aspect of creativity in young children's learning. With the aim of developing a framework for identifying "possibility…