This study explored whether the directionality of the relation between majority language and various facets of socioemotional development (three to 5 years old) differs between children with different language backgrounds. 12,951 children (49% girls; 85% White, 6% Pakistani and Bangladeshi, 3% Black, 3% Mix, 2% Indian) from the British Millennium…

Poor physical development in young children has been shown to impact readiness for school, behaviour, social development and academic achievement. This research sought to explore whether a physical intervention programme (Movement for Learning) can improve children's physical development. The Movement Assessment Battery for Children (2nd edition,…

Research on factors underlying socioeconomic status (SES)-related inequalities in child development mainly focuses on single countries and specific influential factors. Only few studies scrutinize to what extent differences in children's early behavioural outcomes vary across countries and whether the processes that account for them are common or…

Early numerical skills are important not only for later mathematical achievement but for overall achievement and are associated with later income, health, and quality of life. Socioeconomic disparities in numerical skills are visible before children begin school, and widen throughout schooling. It is, therefore, important to support the…

In recent years, preschooler's self-regulation has been extensively researched. This systematic review deals with the overlaps and differences among the many different terminologies and definitions of self-regulation in childhood and the association with preschooler's social-emotional and behavioural development. A systematic literature search in…

Social and emotional development in early childhood has been shown to predict long-term outcomes, including school readiness and academic achievement. Early years practitioners need robust assessment tools to adequately identify early signs of social, emotional, behavioural and mental health (SEMH) difficulties. The current study aimed to develop…

In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important…

Songs seem popular for achieving educational purposes other than teaching music in early education, despite scant evidence to support this 'folk pedagogy'. To investigate why teachers use songs, this mixed-methods study explored teachers' self-reported purposes for using songs in an online questionnaire (n = 103) and semi-structured interviews (n…

The presence of primitive (infant) reflexes in school-aged children as indicators of immaturity in neuromotor functioning has been associated with under-achievement in terms of reading, writing and mathematics, and been linked to conditions such as dyslexia, developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder…

Remembering to carry out intended actions in the future, known as prospective memory (PM), is an important cognitive ability. In daily life, individuals remember to perform future tasks that might rely on effortful processes (monitoring) but also habitual tasks that might rely on more automatic processes. The development of PM across childhood in…

Mathematics in early years settings is often restricted to learning to count and identifying simple shapes. This is partly due to the narrow scope of many early years curricula and insufficient teacher training for exploring deeper mathematical concepts. We note that geometry is an area particularly neglected. In an innovative year-long project, a…

The physical activity (PA) of young children is critical to their future activity, health and development, however, little is known about how the organisation of early years foundation stage (EYFS) settings impacts upon children's PA. This study aimed to measure the PA of children in Nursery and Reception classes and to explore their PA according…

Language and communication improvement approaches designed by SLT services for delivery by early years practitioners can be effective in principle, but what helps or hinders initial and ongoing success? In this implementation study, we investigated the experiences of 10 practitioners who became Language Leads (LLs) and delivered the Language Lead…

There are a growing number of school-based interventions designed to promote children's social and emotional learning. One such intervention, PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies), was evaluated in a randomised controlled trial involving 5074 pupils aged 4-6 years at baseline in 56 primary schools across a large city in the UK. The…

Reading and telling stories to children improves their narrative skills, which is well-documented for monolinguals, but not for bilinguals. We investigated whether bilingual narratives improve when the child is provided with a model story. We studied the narratives of Polish-English bilingual children (n = 75, mean age 5;7 years; months) raised in…