Children, including those who are deaf, become aware of and learn about their environments through playing and social and cultural interactions. For most deaf children, preschool classrooms are optimal spaces for these interactions to occur, but only if they can fully engage with this environment. We discuss the need for and constituent aspects of…

The performance of standardized tests is an ongoing matter of concern for childhood researchers. Standardized tests are often described as neglecting the ethical complexities of doing research with young children. However, this critique is primarily presented in general terms, and does not attend to the locality and specificity of particular test…

This chapter reviews recent research regarding behavior interventions for young children. We first consider the implications of allowing maladaptive behavior to remain untreated in young children. The reasons that people may select for inaction are illustrated through a case example of an individual who manifested behavior problems that were…

Research on the development of active learning and information search behaviors has been growing rapidly, drawing interest from multiple disciplines, from developmental psychology to cognitive science and artificial intelligence. These different perspectives can open pathways to understanding how preschool-age children grow into adaptive and…

Increasingly concerns are expressed about the formalisation of early childhood education and the loss of opportunities for children's play in a range of European and European heritage countries. This paper takes up this challenge by discussing, from a cultural-historical perspective, the relations between play and learning in pre-school settings.…

The adoption of interventions for infants and young children with disabilities/delays or at risk of disability/delay is likely to be influenced by sources other than research evidence. Where the available research evidence does influence the choice of intervention, there may be difficulties translating research that has been implemented in a…

Japanese teachers consider clean-up time to be the group's responsibility, and they rely on the use of music and encouragement to make clean-up time an appealing activity. The children's positive feelings also may be partially explained by the fact that teachers consider clean-up time to be an extension of play, saving toys and activities for the…

The teaching and learning of design technology that occurs in nature-based early childhood education and care (ECEC) contexts such as nature kindergartens remains under-theorised. There is a growing body of scholarship that describes how teaching and learning occurs in these contexts as well as highlighting the benefits for young children learning…

This article engages with new materialist posthumanist philosophy to conceptually approach an ethics of outdoor environmental education with the focus on a pupil's body. Thinking with place-responsive pedagogy, I aim to extend a conversation toward exploring a child's body as a place. Place-responsive pedagogy, while it challenges a commonly…

This paper reports on an analysis of patterns of children's bodily movements in an Early Years classroom. I illustrate two prevalent patterns identified during close observations of children's walking movements as they as they followed their interests while accessing continuous provision in an Early Years setting in England. I termed the patterned…

Purpose: Children's literacy interest is positively associated with their literacy attainments. However, interest in literacy activities, particularly for younger children, is likely influenced by their home literacy environment (HLE), which may also be bound up with socio-economic factors, such as parental education levels. Method: In the present…

Although children's physical environments play an important role in their development, there have been few empirical studies on the interior design of early childhood centres. This is partly due to a lack of adequate methods and instruments for the systematic spatial investigation of educational environments. In light of this, the following paper…

Reading ability is profoundly important, for individuals and for the societies of which they are a part. Research indicates that we should be successfully teaching 95% of children to read, yet, in reality, high rates of reading failure are common in western, industrialized nations. In large part, this reflects a failure to translate into practice…

This paper presents data from a multi-year ethnography of a rural preschool in the United States in which children engaged in substantial free and structured imaginative play. An unexpected parent death during the course of the data collection period was followed by a spate of death-related play and storytelling by the children, with varied adult…

Research shows that high-quality pre-K can have lasting impacts on children's learning and development, with the largest effects clustered among children of color, multilin­gual learners, and children experiencing poverty. Yet policymakers, administrators, and teachers often wrestle with the complexities of providing these programs on a large…