"Creative Little Scientists" was a 30-month (2011-2014) EU/FP7-funded research project focusing on the synergies between early years science and mathematics education and the development of children's creativity, in response to increasing interest in these areas in European educational policy. Using a variety of methods, including desk…

Globally competent people are aware of world issues, take perspective, are engaged and know how to communicate to different people. This article portraits a story of two kindergarten classrooms, one in the United States and the other in Greece, both working with culturally diverse children and, in the case of the American classroom, English…

Even very young children think about their own and others' behavior, including emotions. Such cognitions and emotions about the self and others convey information that is crucial to social interactions and relationships. The current study based on an integrated model of emotion processes and cognition in social information processing (SIP) aimed…

The aim of this study was to explore preschool children's perceptions of their performance under competitive and non-competitive conditions (NCC) and their satisfaction. Eighty preschool children (40 boys, 40 girls) aged 4-6 years (M age?=?5.48, SD?=?0.57) took part in this study. Preschool children built a tower under competitive and NCC and…

In early childhood education, opportunities for developing children's thinking skills are unlimited. One of the most effective teaching strategies for this purpose is open-ended questioning. The study presented here aimed to explore the degree to which Greek early childhood teachers promote the development of thinking skills in their pupils. Data…

This study examined the role of kindergarten children's feelings about the perceived quality of their relationships with their teachers and their emotions towards their teachers in their competence beliefs and learning motivation (intrinsic interest, learning goals), in the impact of competence beliefs on learning motivation, and in turn in school…

The continuum of beliefs reported by Greek pre-service kindergarten teachers and how those beliefs relate to classroom practices are explored in this article. Considering the potentially important influence of teachers' beliefs on their practices, the level of early childhood teachers' beliefs about developmentally appropriate practices (DAPs) and…

Early childhood education is a profession which requires the professional staff to spend considerable time in intense involvement with other people. The pressure from the demands this profession has can create a sense of physical and emotional exhaustion that often leads to burnout. Thus, previous research has linked perceptions of the work…

Although action-research is a well-known research methodology in the field of education, in the case of Greece there are few actions-researches carried out by early childhood teachers. The absence of action-research in early childhood education settings is related to the way many early childhood teachers shape their professional role as well as…

Though quality in early childhood education and care has attracted last decades enormous research interest there is still not a unanimous agreement about its definition. Yet, almost all definitions attempted include interaction, group size, adult:child ratio and early childhood educators' level of education, as important indices of quality.…

The researchers studied humour among Chinese and Greek preschool children in relation to cognitive development. The sample included 55 Chinese children and 50 Greek children ages 4½ to 5½ years. Results showed that both Chinese and Greek children's humour recognition were significantly and positively correlated to their cognitive development, but…

Compared Greek and Scottish preschool staff responses to questionnaire regarding sexuality and sex education. Found that staff agreed on importance of sexual development, some long-term aims of sex education, and the moral dimension of sex education. Staff differed in extent to which they thought families and preschools should provide sex…

This study examined young children's spontaneous participation during classroom book reading in response to different types of books. Twenty kindergarten teachers read four books--two fiction (familiar/unfamiliar story format) and two information books (expository/narrative text). The majority of children's spontaneous participation was related to…

The recent years in our country we are facing an increasingly great number of immigrant students, mainly from East European countries and the Balkans, particularly in many Greek elementary schools and kindergartens. Aim of the presented study is to sketch the problems that came out from the co-existence of students with different cultural…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the attitudes of early childhood teachers towards computers and Information Technology (IT). The study examined whether or not attitudes are differentiated by a series of factors, such as: years of previous service, the use of a computer at home (with Internet access), inservice training, and…