The quality of early childhood experiences is crucial to a child's development and educational success. Yet few early childhood education and care services in the world today offer a consistently high level of educational quality. In particular, educational quality depends on the context's characteristics. The aim of this study was therefore to…

Joint attention is an important developmental skill. This series of studies investigated the teaching of component joint attention skills to 10 children with autism ranging in age from three to five years. The goal was to teach gaze shifting within a joint attention interaction. An additional goal was to expand some participants' community of…

Objective: Physical activity (PA) is essential to promote both optimal physical and emotional health in preschool children. Hence, well-founded PA guidelines are essential. 24-hour Movement Guidelines (which include PA, recreational screen time and sleep) have been established. Thus, this study aimed to explore preschool-aged children's adherence…

The risk potentiation model of cognitive control posits that inhibitory control heightens children's risk for problematic outcomes in the context of shyness because it limits shy children's ability to engage flexibly with their environment. Although there is empirical support for the risk potentiation model, most studies have been restricted to…

The present study investigated whether distinct developmental patterns of externalizing behaviors (EBs: hyperactivity-impulsivity, noncompliance, physical aggression) based on parent reports were repeatedly and differentially associated with separate dimensions of internalizing problems such as general anxiety, separation anxiety, and depressive…

Intellectual impairments in preschoolers have been widely studied. A regularity that emerges is that children's intellectual impairments have an important impact on later adjustments in life. However, few studies have looked at the intellectual profiles of young psychiatric outpatients. This study aimed to describe the intelligence profile of…

Limited access to screening and evaluation for autism spectrum disorder in children is a major barrier to improving outcomes for marginalized families. To identify and evaluate available digital autism spectrum disorder screening resources, we simulated web and mobile app searches by a parent concerned about their child's likelihood of autism…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the practical use of video cameras during a study with young children. Design/methodology/approach: This paper investigates the use of video cameras in a research study of young children's utilisation of semiotic tools to communicate during play interactions in a Francophone preschool classroom in…

Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

In December, 2013, revised Alberta child care accreditation standards were released by the Alberta Government in Canada that included a new standard for physical activity and sedentary behavior in accredited child care settings. The main purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the new accreditation standard in increasing physical…

The "Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Fourth Edition" (WPPSI-IV; Wechsler, 2012a, 2012b) is a comprehensive clinical tool, intended for assessing cognitive functioning among children aged 2 years 6 months through 7 years 7 months. Published by Pearson, the WPPSI-IV is an individually administered tool, to be used by…

The ability to mentally rotate objects in space has been singled out by cognitive scientists as a central metric of spatial reasoning (see Jansen, Schmelter, Quaiser-Pohl, Neuburger, & Heil, 2013; Shepard & Metzler, 1971 for example). However, this is a particularly undeveloped area of current mathematics curricula, especially in North…

This study explored the relationship between electronic media use, sleep and behaviour in preschool-aged children between the ages of three and five years. The primary hypothesis of this study was that excessive electronic media use (>2 hours a day) would positively correlate with sleep patterns (in particular, disturbances) and negative…

A growing body of theoretical and empirical work has been attempting to answer the questions of how and how much of the effects of children's early experience may depend on their inner characteristics. Theory and evidence suggest that some children, notably those with difficult temperaments, are more susceptible to both negative and positive…

This empirical study investigated the manifestation of prosocial sharing behaviours and how this interplayed with preschool-aged children's Theory of Mind (ToM), described in cognitive science as one's ability to ascribe mental states to others and how the ascribed states are used to explain and predict the actions f others, when using media and…