The following trends have been in motion in the field of early childhood development (ECD) for some time: (1) the concept of ECD is increasingly taking on additional connotations; (2) in Europe children are becoming a minority group and other age groups, such as the elderly, see them as competitors for the same limited resources; (3) the downward…

After six weeks of reading instruction using a microcomputer, 10 deaf children (three to six years old) demonstrated significant improvement in word recognition and identification. Results suggested that instruction should take advantage of the young child's cognitive readiness regardless of his/her primary mode of communication. (CL)

The outcomes of collaboration provide an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of cognitive change, one that is clarified by examining the collaborative processes themselves. Results from a study illustrate the dangers of focusing solely on the consequences of collaboration and emphasize why the analysis of collaborative processes is…

Many studies have shown that children of various ages learn from educational television, but the studies have not explained how children extract and comprehend educational content from these television programs. This paper proposes a model, the "capacity model," that focuses on children's allocation of working memory resources while…

Two studies looked into the ability of 3- to 5-year-olds to understand the idea that a person who intends to bring about a bad outcome will be pleased when he does so. Previous studies had conflicting outcomes; one found children under age 7 did not understand the idea, while another found that most 5-year-olds did. The first of the two studies…

A new measure of temperament, Rothbart's Children's Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ), was used to compare children with attachments to objects and those without such attachments. Comparisons were used to determine whether temperament differences between children with and without a history of object attachment held for children with and without a…

The affective relationship between six male and one female preschool-aged autistic children and their parents was studied by employing a method enabling systematic analysis of parent/child interaction. Children ranged in age from 3 years, 7 months to 6 years, 4 months. Through use of the Bank Interaction Coding System (BICS), behaviorial sequences…

Situational socialization goals were investigated as determinants of parental choice of disciplinary technique. It was predicted that parents would tend to use techniques such as reasoning when they had long-term compliance goals for their children and power-assertive techniques when they had short-term compliance goals. A total of 64 mothers and…

The hypothesis was tested that highly anxious students invited to employ reflective learning strategies would spontaneously use a more reflective, less impulsive approach in solving response-oriented problems. A total of 53 fourth-grade students were administered the Child Anxiety Scale: 12 students were assigned to a high-anxiety treatment group,…

Eighteen studies (1952-1982) evaluating early therapeutic intervention for children with cerebral palsy are reviewed. Studies are explained to feature provisions of some type of traditional, neurophysiological/sensorimotor, or eclectic therapy and to have excluded pharmacological, dietary, or other specialized treatment procedures. Analysis is…

Because schemas are often defined imprecisely and intuitively, the term "schema" is often misapplied in research. Consequently, researchers may fail to understand the complete scope of the phenomenon they are studying. Discussions of children's gender schema development and the influence of the gender schema on children's social…

A series of studies evaluated methodological issues in the investigation of children's developing comprehension and production of the words "because" and "so." The familiarity of task materials and their relevance to 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children's experience were the focus of the first study. For the second study, involving…

The problem of "stages" in the development of artistic ability is addressed by reviewing the cases of a gifted autistic child, Nadia, who drew realistically at a very young age, and of a normal child, Eytan, who rapidly taught himself the principles of isometric perspective and of foreshortening. A review of scholarly opinion about…

This study tests the hypothesis that men's and women's psychological commitment to parenting and work exerts an influence on their expectations for and perceptions of their children's behavior. Subjects were 104 fathers and 194 mothers, each with a preschool child, who were employed in a wide range of occupations. Data were collected by means of…

Longitudinal studies of mother-child interactions for the third trimester of pregnancy to age 4 are described. The effort is aimed at analyzing early childhood data to determine stability of mother-infant interaction, correlations among mothers' character as defined by adaptive and maladaptive defenses, major conflicts, sense of reality, and…