Children's storybooks often contain fantasy elements, from dragons and wizards to anthropomorphic animals that wear clothes, talk, and behave like humans. These elements can impact children's learning from storybooks both positively and negatively, perhaps due in part to their ability to capture children's interest and attention. Prior research…

The literature defines curiosity and interest, but it is not clear how interest can be generated, where interest is positioned in the learning process, and what the impact of interest is on cognitive and emotional development. This paper reports on a three-year, iterative design-based research project involving three separate cohorts totalling 57…

Young children learn best through hands-on, authentic experiences that motivates, stimulates and supports their growth in all areas of development. This includes the skills necessary to enhance their literacy and language acquisition, physical and cognitive development in addition to their social-emotional development and approaches to learning.…

Current research has shown the importance and benefits of early science education for children's learning and development, particularly informal science learning. In informal learning spaces such as museums, parents can play an important role in facilitating and supporting children's science learning. However, existing studies often fail to…

Children's storybooks often contain fantasy elements, from dragons and wizards to anthropomorphic animals that wear clothes, talk, and behave like humans. These elements can impact children's learning from storybooks both positively and negatively, perhaps due in part to their ability to capture children's interest and attention. Prior research…

Talent development research has uncovered common conditions for nurturing talented individuals: enriched early environment, appropriate instruction, long-term and deliberate practice, singleness of purpose, and centers of excellence. Talent research also reveals that parents play a critical role in arranging and facilitating these conditions and…

For decades, the fields of early childhood intervention and early childhood special education (EI/ECSE) have been promoting child participation in naturally occurring family and classroom activities and routines as the context for intervention and the use of caregiver coaching as a capacity-building, family-centered interaction style. The…

Agency and its role in the early literacy classroom has long been a topic for debate. While sociocultural accounts often portray the child as a cultural agent who negotiates their own participation in classroom culture and literacy learning, more recent framings draw attention from the individual subject, instead seeing agency as dispersed across…

Purpose: This study aims to explore young children's information practices within the context of their individual interests, examining children's interest-related information activities, challenges encountered and enablers received. Design/methodology/approach: Participants included 18 children between five and seven years of age and their…

This paper outlines the findings from an integrated diagnostic assessment of manifestations of giftedness in senior preschoolers and their interest in professions. The authors investigated the relationship between manifestations of a certain type of giftedness in children and their interest in a certain group of professions. The assessment of…

Since 2004 and the enlargement of the EU, increased migration from Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries to the UK necessitates sustained research on the implications for children, their families and practitioners in the early years. This paper draws upon a sociocultural approach to bring into focus family story-sharing practices. We report…

Children's food preferences are strongly associated with their consumption patterns. Children tend to choose foods with which they are familiar. It is proposed that the earlier and broader the experience with food, the healthier the child's or adult´s diet. In a focus group we developed a toolkit consisting of a training course for kindergarten…

This article presents findings from the first year of a multiyear investigation of the implementation of the Dolly Parton Imagination Library (DPIL) book distribution program as part of one community's long-term initiative to improve early literacy skills. The authors describe (a) the study's logic model and associated theory of change, (b)…

This study deals with detecting the difficulties that prospective teachers encounter in recognising and analysing children's ideas in the domains of social studies and science. It qualitatively analyses the reports written by 94 third-year Early Childhood Education degree students, while they were taking courses on "Teaching the natural…

Play-based learning is of growing interest in many English-medium primary schools throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. I share my insights from researching play as learning, and supporting teachers with curriculum design and pedagogy in play-based contexts. Although play is a slippery concept and its value often underestimated, the evidence of the…