Recent research has shown that caregiver education and training can be important in determining levels of quality in early childhood, but has mainly considered the education and training of the lead teacher. In infant child care, however, classrooms have more than one caregiver with varying levels of education and in Portugal it is less common to…

Infant-toddler teachers have the least education, the lowest pay, and the highest turnover rate of all adults in the field of early childhood education. In this article, the unique needs of infants, toddlers, and their families are explored at the 2-year associate (AA) and the 4-year bachelor (BA) levels of early childhood higher education degree…

The twofold purpose of this article is to highlight the importance of fostering social competence within inclusive preschool programs and to describe a model for training teachers in research-based social facilitation strategies so as to promote social interaction between children with and without disabilities. This model was developed to address…

The current study examined the impact of the relationship-enhancement phase of the Teacher-Child Interaction Training (TCIT) intervention on child behavior and teacher skill use within an urban therapeutic classroom milieu. Participants included four preschool children (mean age 4 years, 8 months) with clinical diagnoses attending a therapeutic…

The purpose of this study was to identify the different incidents of critical thinking in five preschool classrooms in one school, and the instructional strategies preschool teachers employed in the development of children's critical thinking. The participants in this study were five self-contained preschool teachers and their corresponding…

Intensive Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) training courses for Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) can have a positive effect on their use of interaction strategies that support children's communication skills. The impact of brief SLT training courses is not yet clearly understood. The aims of these two studies were to assess the impact of a brief…

Research Findings: This study investigated relations among preschool teachers' (n = 75) sense of community, classroom language and literacy instructional quality, and children's (n = 398) gains in vocabulary and print concept knowledge during an academic year. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) results indicated that teachers' language and…

Researchers have recognized that quality early education programs yield positive long-term benefits, but have failed to examine the relationships between these teacher characteristics and teacher-child interactions. This quantitative study was nonexperimental with data gathered through naturalistic observation. The extent to which years of early…

The purpose of this study was to determine if levels of teacher education and experience would influence how teachers respond to children's play needs in a preschool classroom. The interactions of eight teachers--three of whom were categorized as high education/high experience, three as low education/high experience, and two as low education/low…

Research Findings: Quality of care for preschool children in inclusive and noninclusive classrooms was examined in two studies. In Study 1, comparisons across a large sample of classrooms (N = 1, 313) showed that inclusive classrooms were higher than noninclusive classrooms in global quality as well as on two dimensions of quality…

Four preschool supervisors were individually trained in a collaborative team approach in which classroom and resource teachers together developed a plan to increase the peer interactions of the entire class, including children with disabilities. The purpose of the research was to assess the generalization of effects to a new program target…

It is generally agreed that because so much basic early learning occurs through interactive experiences when children are very young, the quality of teacher-child interactions contributes substantially to effects of group care and preschool education on children. Thus it is important to know if specialized teacher education in early childhood…

It is generally agreed that because so much basic early learning occurs through interactive experiences when children are very young, the quality of teacher-child interactions contributes substantially to effects of group care and preschool education on children. Thus it is important to know if specialized teacher education in early childhood…