Posing the question, "What does it mean to care?" this visual work came about through a collaboration between teachers, children, and a local artist to render experiences of care from children's daily lives within an early years laboratory school. Working from a perspective of material-discursive intra-activity (Barad, 2003, 2007), this…

This paper builds upon an ethnographical doctoral study that explored how adults exercise power over children. Anchored in the worlds of children's lived experiences, it explores whether play can be deeper, richer and more meaningful when children are beyond the watchful eye of adults. It focuses on children's play within the spaces they occupied…

Overall, game-based technology for early reading instruction has not robustly met the learning potentials of young readers. To better understand the effects and limitations of computer-assisted instruction in classrooms, researchers have called for more critical attention to learning theory, methodological selection, and context for learning.…

Playful experiences provide us with the opportunity to engage with others and learn in enjoyable ways. Recognising and building on the power of playfulness and play can be a way to support more meaningful educational experiences for all, life-wide and lifelong. This "Trends Shaping Education Spotlight" touches on gamification as a…

Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who were interested in working as behavior technicians for young children with autism, participated in 2 experiments. Participants included 5 adults with Asperger syndrome or pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, 19 to 23 years old, and 11 children with autism, 3 to 7 years old. In…

We taught social responses to young children with autism using an adult as the recipient of the social interaction and then assessed generalization of performance to adults and peers who had not participated in the training. Although the participants' performance was similar across adults, responding was less consistent with peers, and a…

This article investigates processes of engagement in social pretend play between children with autism (age range 3.6 to 7.2 years) and adult play partners, using a large corpus of conversational data. We take a qualitative discourse analytic approach to investigate the metacommunicative strategies used by the children. Our initial framework for…

This book provides a holistic overview of what leads to success in foreign language learning at an early age and deepens our understanding of early foreign language learning. The studies use an array of methodological approaches to research learners aged between three and ten, as well as their parents and teachers, in instructional, minimal-input…

From an integrative approach, this work focuses on the role of conceptual mechanisms, such as comparison and conceptual-based inference, and sociopragmatic support in young children's taxonomic categorization. "Experiment 1" assessed whether 3-, 4-, and 6-year-old children succeed in detecting taxonomic relations on their own. A…

Polli Soholt points to normalization in the first plane as leading to the successful realization of the human personality, which is the basis of social development. Children who have cultivated concentration and purposeful work at an early age develop the virtues to become world citizens. Normalization can be assisted by certain practices: 1)…

Research Findings: Research on the effect of experience on the structure and function of the brain across the lifespan pertains directly to the concerns of professionals involved with children's early development and education. This paper briefly reviews (a) the role of experience in shaping the developing brain, (b) individual adaptation to the…

Adults refer young children's attention to things in two basic ways: through the use of pointing (and other deictic gestures) and words (and other linguistic conventions). In the current studies, we referred young children (2- and 4-year-olds) to things in conflicting ways, that is, by pointing to one object while indicating linguistically (in…

Teachers are looking for new ways to respond to challenging behaviour. The premise of the book is that teachers can make a difference and that schools and early childhood education settings can be places where behaviour is addressed with courage and conviction. Both the education sector and wider society are increasingly exploring culturally…

Rules are not helpful in the adult-child community. They are usually stated in the negative: "No," "Don't," etc. The way they are worded, adults seem to expect children to break them. Even when they are not totally negative, like "Be nice to your friends," rules have an "or else" moral implication that adults carry around in their heads. When…

Two studies compared children's attention to sample composition--whether a sample provides a diverse representation of a category of interest--during teacher-led and learner-driven learning contexts. In Study 1 (n = 48), 5-year-olds attended to sample composition to make inferences about biological properties only when samples were presented by a…