Social-emotional skills are crucial for preschool children's mental health and later school success. Most school-based SEL programs originate in the United States, reflecting a robust interest in SEL curricula from preschool through secondary school. While EU Member States are increasingly integrating social and emotional skills programs into…

The current study adopted a case study design with mixed methods to examine the multiple features in child development course syllabi in early childhood teacher education programs in two countries, China and the US. This study provided insights into the twenty syllabi through document review and questionnaires. Twenty-six participants, viewed as…

Preschool education is an education process that prepares children for primary education, provides the training and upbringing conditions in the home and also aims to remove the inequalities in terms of language and society in the early period. The audit is to evaluate learning and all the factors that affect learning and also prepare the…

A quality preschool education plays a key role in achieving its objectives. To benefit from this effect of preschool education in a positive way, countries should investigate education systems and the educational methods and practices of other countries so as to understand the problems of education and the factors affecting it. This brings about…

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to early childhood education and care as a foundation for children's successful development in school and beyond. The great majority of children in postindustrial societies now attend preschools or daycare, making this setting a major part of their culturally constructed developmental niches.…

International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and…

This is the fourth colloquium for "Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood" on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study, and marks the recent publication by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development of reports on the first round of this study. In…

World history education as a type of cultural production has expanded globally in the past thirty years. This article surveys world history as a component of curricula in universities, colleges, and precollegiate schools in several parts of the world. The author argues that teachers and scholars in the United States pioneered this field and that…

This article reports and compares results from an interview study of early childhood teachers in the U.S. and Hong Kong, with a focus on the math outcomes that children may gain from play with unit blocks. Teachers were interviewed to obtain their ideas of the benefits of unit block play in three focal areas: geometry, measurement, and numeracy.…

This article analyzes the case of school choice in the United States and its implications for the Brazilian context. This discussion is important to Brazil, given the fact that key actors are starting to advocate in favor of introducing charter schools and vouchers in the country. Evidence from countries that introduced this model can help shed…

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education has been actively implemented around the world recently. ICT curriculum in schools is intended to improve students' programming-oriented thinking rather than to train them as programmers. The core of ICT education is 'computational thinking'. Computational thinking is taking an approach to…

The two studies examined in this paper compare the different mathematical opportunities provided in preschool classrooms in China, Japan, and the United States, with an emphasis on mathematical-themed books in classroom libraries. Study one presents the results of an online survey to examining the content of preschool classroom libraries in China…

This article introduces the topic of the special issue, 'Public education at the crossroads', by pointing to some of the debates and controversies surrounding the topic of public education and by framing the theme, while explaining the context and some components of the educational systems of the countries under examination -- namely the USA and…

This study tested international similarities and differences in scores on a scale comprising 12 items identified by international mental health experts as being very consistent with the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (5th ed.) category of autism spectrum disorder. Participants were 19,850 preschoolers in 24…

Cognitive development and sociocultural theories support the role of play and peer cooperative problem solving (CPS) in children's learning and development; nevertheless, we still lack cross-cultural studies that investigate children's CPS during play in natural classroom contexts in early childhood. A nine-month field work including ethnographic…