Belonging is emerging as an important concept in contemporary early childhood curricula, and calls have recently been made for belonging to be critically interrogated and further theorized. This article explores how belonging was operating for an infant in Australian family day care by looking at an episode that took place between the infant, a…

Background: One of the most commonly cited rationales for inclusive education is to enable the development of quality relationships with typically developing peers. Relatively few researchers have examined the features of the range of relationships that children with developmental disability form in inclusive school settings. Method: Interviews…

This study examined the effects on 6- and 8-year old children (n = 160) of rejection versus acceptance by an initial group, the reason for the rejection or acceptance (personal versus category-based), and the norms (inclusion versus exclusion) of a new group to which the children were assigned, on their negative affect and attitudes towards the…

Developmental changes in the encoding of unfamiliar faces was studied in three experiments with Australian 7- to 12-year-old children (N=24 in experiment 1, N=48 in experiment 2, and N=32 in experiment 3). Results showed that younger children encoded unfamiliar faces in terms of striking isolated features and that avoidant children made more…

Reports that children in three age groups (second, fourth, and sixth grades) held firm body-build stereotypes that increased with age but that individual subjects did not apply such stereotypic judgments to their classmates, nor did their self-esteem correlate to their own build or popularity. (Author/RL)

Reported in this symposium are (1) a study of interpersonal awareness, peer acceptance, and interpersonal strategies among Australian preschool children, by Norman F. Kafer, (2) a longitudinal study of the learning preferences of Australian primary and secondary school students, by Lee Owens, and (3) an abstract of an investigation of co-operative…