This paper examines current research policies concerned with infant care and discusses these policies within the context of policies affecting the broader areas of family life and society as a whole. The paper discusses the role of the federal government in the lives of families in this country and presents a list of family-oriented goals which…

The development of the Conversational Unit (CU) was investigated in a semilongitudinal study of three mother/son dyads in nonstructured spontaneous communication. The children were 19 to 23 months old at the start of the investigation. Sound films were recorded monthly during bathing and feeding times. After four months, verbal and nonverbal…

Explores three aspects of temporally displaced talk between mothers and children: (1) the role of the knowledge base in such talk; (2) the effect of mother talk on child talk; and (3) the impact of such talk on the child's knowledge base. Indicates that maternal speech can mediate information and experience and contribute to the child's world…

This paper explores the Counting development of Australian children participating in the Early Numeracy Research Project (ENRP) who were identified as low-attaining using an individually administered assessment interview and a research informed framework of growth-points. The progress of Grade 1 and Grade 2 children who participated in an…

Presents salient features of workshop discussion examining values, culture, and identity in early childhood education. Discusses issues related to identity, child rearing, language, and curriculum content for trainers and children. Considers the relationship between minority and majority cultures, language and power relations, and dominant and…

This essay examines the development of individual differences in emotion regulation and the role that specific styles of emotion regulation and dysregulation play in affecting young children's interactive behavior with peers. It advances a general developmental pathway that conceptualizes individual variations in terms of both infant traits and…

A study examined whether a field placement in a preschool program enhanced preservice teachers' understanding of the emerging literacy process. The study was conducted in two preschool classrooms in an urban school district in central New Jersey during the spring semester of 1996. Subjects were 26 graduate and undergraduate preservice teachers who…

Recognizing and appreciating culturally diverse views of what is best for children is important, as underscored by the views of childhood evident in early childhood education programs in China. Families and schools in modern China experience unique social and political pressures, the most obvious of which is the "one child policy," which…

A study examined the early literacy experiences of rural disabled children, ages 3-8. Data originated from a subset of the National Household Education Survey of 1995 that included 1,316 families with disabled children and 8,009 families with nondisabled children. Participants were asked about their race/ethnicity, education level, native…

In contrast to standardized tests, which do not accurately reflect the achievement of young students, portfolio assessment is a valuable tool for documenting a student's development. Portfolio assessment can be conducted formally or informally through observation or by interview. Documentation of observations can take the form of checklists,…

A study examined the effectiveness of the West Heidelberg (Australia) Early Literacy Project (WHELP), which helps low income and working class parents develop the literacy skills of their 4-year-old children by, among other things, reading regularly to them. The project developed through three phases with three different methods of delivering…

This study examined parental strategies used with beginning readers, particularly how parents responded to children's miscues and what general admonitions they provided while listening to their children read. Subjects were 19 middle-class children (from 5 to 7 years old) and their parents. Each parent-child pair was visited at home and presented…

The Listening Partners project examined rural mothers' development of a sense of the power of their own minds and voices and the relationship between this sense of power and mothers' parenting strategies and their children's development. Two cohorts of 60 women from a rural, impoverished region of Vermont participated in the program. Half the…

This paper describes the Netherlands' Pyramid Project, a classroom-based early intervention program which integrates nursery school and primary school organization and content for 3- to 6-year-olds who need special support, such as ethnic or language minority (allochtone) children and children from disadvantaged situations. Section 1 of the paper…

The stability of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) was studied by examining its performance over a 5-year interval with 16 non-handicapped children aged 45 to 61 months at the beginning of the study. Global scale stability coefficients (corrected for restriction in range) for Time 1 testing (age 4 years) and Time 4 testing (age 9…