Playing the violin demands highly skilled motor performance, including advanced bimanual coordination and controlled, independent movement of fingers. Through existing literature, the current study aims to demonstrate how young children's motor development relates to the motor demands of violin playing, specifically the demands on the left hand,…

This study identified and discussed principals' perceptions of acceleration and enrichment for gifted students. These areas have proven significant for the teaching of the gifted. The research questions included questions about perceptions of giftedness and how principals organize to allow gifted students to develop and learn based on their…

The purpose of this study was to improve the conceptual development of an infant through age-appropriate picture books, as well as potentially reveal the effects of such books for developing concepts in children's literature. Study participants used the changing criterion design from single-case research models that consisted of 1 infant and 3…

Despite evidence that play supports learning and development across a range of domains in early childhood, play time has been decreasing for many young children in recent years. Early care and education (ECE) teachers are in a unique position to promote developmentally appropriate play as a way to help young children learn, and ECE teachers'…

Educational robotics has been adopted to create interactive and engaging learning environments to develop computational thinking (CT) in K-12 learners. This study systematically examined 22 peer-reviewed empirical research articles on the use of educational robotics to develop CT in young learners (pre-kindergarten to 6th grade) published between…

Caribbean nations have leaned on and undergirded their early childhood programmes with Developmentally Appropriate Practices promulgated by the NAEYC. For many years the guidance provided by DAP has been used in both the development of standards of practice for early childhood professionals as well as curriculum development. In recent years…

National science reform documents recommend several nature of science (NOS) elements to introduce to children early in the science curriculum. A researcher developed questionnaire was used to gather information from a random, national sample about early elementary teachers' perceptions of the developmental appropriateness of 12 NOS aspects for the…

Policymakers' reforms continue to narrow the landscape of early childhood education to a limited set of practices centered on improving children's academic performance. These changes not only influence the training preservice teachers receive but also impact their sensemaking of how to teach the students in their future classrooms. Such challenges…

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) has received widespread attention worldwide and technology companies designed educational applications (apps) focusing on STEM. Young children have access to tablets and smartphones and they engage with a variety of apps every day. Prior research showed that young children learn from…

This study aimed to identify which factors have the greatest influence on the satisfaction of faculty members who attended higher education professional development programs in teaching. The study included 2,330 cases collected over a three-year period. The results highlighted seven factors that explained 72% of satisfaction and had the greatest…

Objective: As the number of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) for children has been constantly growing, there is a benefit to be derived for a comprehensive study that gathers what mindfulness activities have been reported to be effective at particular developmental stages, and how these practices have been modified to make them…

"TechCheck" is an assessment of Computational Thinking (CT) for early elementary school children consisting of fifteen developmentally appropriate unplugged challenges that probe six CT domains. The first version of "TechCheck" showed good psychometric properties as well as ease of administration and scoring in a validation…

This paper employs critical discourse analysis to examine the conceptualisation of disability within Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) and to investigate how DAP addresses the role of early childhood educators working with children with disabilities in inclusive classrooms. The research questions guiding this study are: 1) How is…

In this report, we perform a descriptive analysis of kindergarten readiness in Illinois. We use data on the population of Illinois kindergarteners between the 2017-18 and 2021-22 school years provided by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). In our analysis, we build on the existing literature and examine readiness over time, by domain,…

We investigated the extent to which practices considered developmentally appropriate and inappropriate varied by preschool program auspice (private, public school, and Head Start). Survey data from a 2010 national sample of 2,664 teachers of 4-year-olds provided teacher reports on the frequency of seven practices (e.g., offering children choices…