This article argues for the development of a framework through which to describe children's multimodal texts. Such a shared discourse should be capable of including different modes and media and the ways in which children integrate and combine them for their own meaning-making purposes. It should also acknowledge that multimodal texts are not…

The Childhood Asperger Syndrome Test (CAST) is a 37-item parental self-completion questionnaire to screen for autism spectrum conditions in research. Good test accuracy was demonstrated in studies with primary school aged children in mainstream schools. The aim of this study was to investigate the test-retest reliability of the CAST. Parents of…

In this article, the author explores gender issues which arose out of a literacy discussion with children in a reception class in a primary school. First an account is given of the discussion. This is followed by an examination of gender-related issues amongst fellow practitioners and parents. Here, the author intends to show the importance of…

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a project to support the learning of the mother tongue by children aged 4-8 years. The aim of the project was to: actively involve and engage children with learning their mother tongue for functional use; involve parents in the learning process and support them in doing so; and increase…

Concerns about pupil disengagement from school and society have led to compulsory citizenship education in state schools in England. However, there is little evidence that the new citizenship education is meeting its goals. The research described here assesses a new approach to citizenship education that appears to overcome some of the identified…

An experiment was conducted with 40 children, ages four to six, who were tested from both "good" and "poor" viewing positions on a perspective-taking task. As hypothesized, children showed no bias toward the view they chose when it was poor. However, when they had a good view they chose their own rather than another equally…

Examined the young child's ability to appreciate and coordinate different perspectives in a visuo-spatial task. Results indicated even very young children have the potential to coordinate points of view. (Author/DB)

Thirty teachers and 20 5- to 7-year olds viewed videos of playground fighting episodes. Teachers reported difficulty in distinguishing between playful and real fighting; 30% thought playful fighting was twice as frequent as real. They tended to agree with children on the nature of the episodes but used a wider range of cues in making judgments.…

Highlights the Early Literacy Links project, which used questionnaires, observations in nursery and primary school, and interviews with practitioners to examine emergent literacy in France and England. Explores the idea of "entering the world of writing" with the Anglo-Saxon notion of emergent literacy. (Author/KB)

The study reported here investigates the role of pre-school education as a protective factor in the development of children who are at risk due to environmental and individual factors. This investigation builds upon earlier research by examining different kinds of "quality" in early education and tests the hypothesis that pre-schools of…

In adults, visual search for a colour target is facilitated if the target and distractors fall in different colour categories (e.g. Daoutis, Pilling, & Davies, in press). The present study explored category effects in children's colour search. The relationship between linguistic colour categories and perceptual categories was addressed by…

This article examines messages from participatory research about young children's perspectives of early childhood environments and outdoor spaces in particular. The studies chosen have been carried out in England with children under six years old using the Mosaic approach and are compared with findings from an Icelandic study using the same…

This paper considers pedagogy and outdoor play in the early years. The particular focus is on the specific features and benefits of outdoor play in the Foundation Stage (England) and Foundation Phase (Wales). The paper will draw on current international literature and evidence from outdoor learning constructed in an ongoing research project in two…

Three experiments demonstrate that the context of a two-object array greatly influences the way in which young children represent the array in their copies. Children were aware of differences in orientation and in the nature of paired objects and were concerned with marking these differences in their drawings. (RH)

Exploring the relationship between strategy training and the child's apparent knowledge, this study assessed (1) whether the effects of rehearsal training without added metamnemonic feedback would be evident one week after training, and (2) the effects of specific training upon more general metamnemonic awareness. Initially 40 children 6 years of…