Substantial evidence exists suggesting that access to articulatory gestures during instruction improves students' phonological awareness skills, but researchers have yet to explore the role of articulatory gestures in initial phonics instruction. The purpose of this study was to examine if visual access to articulatory gestures (i.e., mouth cues)…

Daily report card (DRC) intervention provides a structured method for increasing communication between teachers and parents regarding student behavior; however, limited research has investigated the effectiveness and acceptability of DRC intervention with preschool students. Additionally, effectiveness of DRC intervention is enhanced when parents…

Many early childhood educators use the evidenced-based practice of interactive shared book reading (ISBR) to promote the development of important communication and literacy skills. ISBR for preschoolers has been shown to build both vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, which in turn contributes to later language and reading comprehension…

Assessment can be challenging for professionals in the early childhood setting, given the variety of ways that young children show what they know. Early childhood professionals who work with children with exceptionalities take into consideration individual needs when planning for assessments. Authentic assessment provides a more complete picture…

This article describes the use of video-cued multivocal ethnography (VCE) in the Civic Action and Young Children Study conducted with preschool children in South Texas. We detail how and why we continue to use the VCE method as a process of collective reflection and analysis with participating communities. We also explore how VCE helps us enact…

The Preschool Life Skills program is an intervention package designed to teach functional skills to prevent problem behavior in typically developing children. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of the instructional package (renamed "Life Skills") with children with developmental disabilities. The program…

Blocks and block play are ubiquitous to early childhood settings and as such provide a normative context for social interactions between children with and without disabilities. However, children with disabilities tend to engage in more repetitive and less complex play than their peers, which might limit social interactions and opportunities to…

What factors contribute to children's tendency to view individuals as having different traits and abilities? The present research tested whether young children are influenced by adults' nonverbal behaviors when making inferences about peers. In Study 1, participants (aged 5-6 years) viewed multiple videos of interactions between a…

Students who are slow to respond to traditional instruction and intervention require intensified intervention. Visual Activity Schedules (VAS) are an evidence-based type of visual support that provide sequential organization of the steps for an activity or skill. VAS can be aligned with individual student needs, including behavioral support. VAS…

In Romanian preschool settings, there is a tendency to use abstract strategies in language-learning activities. The present study explored if strategies based on an embodied cognition approach facilitate learning more than traditional strategies that progress from concrete to abstract. Twenty-five children between 4 and 5 years of age listened to…

Sensitivity to variations in the spacing of features in faces and a class of nonface objects (i.e., frontal images of cars) was tested in 3- and 4-year-old children and adults using a delayed or simultaneous two-alternative forced choice matching-to-sample task. In the adults, detection of spacing information was robust against exemplar…

The authors describe an intervention for 3 preschoolers with disabilities who had low peer-related social competence. The intervention taught academic skills tailored to the need of each target student in small groups (triads) with two typically developing peers, using a progressive time delay procedure. Prior to instruction and separate from the…

A multiple-baseline design across participants was utilized to investigate the effects of a visual cueing system (VCS) on the ability of three children with Autism Spectrum Disorders to retell the events of their school day. The VCS comprised consistent pictures but text that changed to reflect each day's activities. The participants utilized the…

A growing number of studies suggests cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggests that…

Investigated young children's (N=20) comprehension of sentences containing one or more markers using three tasks in two experiments. Results suggested that children's comprehension of sentential number is aided by redundancy of information involving different syntactic markers, but not by mere repetition of the same maker. (JAC)