Stories are widely used around the world to try to teach children moral lessons. However, it is often difficult for children to figure out how lessons from stories can be applied to real-life settings. In the present research, we tested whether encouraging children to be like the protagonists helps explain the success of positive moral stories…

Number line estimation has been found to be strongly related to mathematical reasoning concurrently and longitudinally. However, the relationship between number line estimation and mathematical reasoning might differ according to children's level of performance. This study investigates whether findings from previous studies that show number line…

There is ongoing debate regarding what performance on the number line estimation task represents and its role in mathematics learning. The patterns followed by children's estimates on the number line task could provide insight into this. This study investigates children's estimation patterns on the number line task and assesses whether mathematics…

Both language input and output are important to child language learners' heritage language development. Nevertheless, existing studies mainly focus on language input, leaving the significance of language output underexplored. The current study assessed 201 kindergarteners' Mandarin skills (i.e., receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and verbal…

The traditional education system is designed around time rather than learning, with a one-size-fits-all curriculum and students moving on after a set amount of time regardless of what or how much they have learned. Educators must rethink how time plays a role in education and instead put attention on student mastery, ensuring each student gets the…

Prosocial behaviours such as sharing are essential for young children's collaborative learning experiences and social development. When learnt during the early years, these behaviours enable positive peer interactions and relationship building in social settings, laying the foundation for young children's social and emotional competencies with…

The Family Outcomes Survey--Revised (FOS-R) measures family outcomes of services for young children with disabilities or developmental delays, and it can be used to investigate change in outcome achievement over time. To confirm the validity of FOS-R change scores, it must be established that the FOS-R measures the same construct over time; if so,…

Lying is a prevalent and normative behavior in young children. Conceptually, it is strongly linked with children's theory-of-mind development. However, empirical studies show that the link between children's lying and theory-of-mind is heterogeneous. This study examined whether parental control and parental warmth moderate the link between…

New research suggests that mechanisms involved in fine motor skills play an important role in reading and writing development. Extending past work that focused on fine motor skills measured in adolescence, the present study followed children longitudinally from ages 5 to 7 to examine early literacy and associated sets of fine motor skills,…

Cultural contexts influence the development of self-regulation. However, cross-cultural variations and consistencies in different aspects of self-regulation and their academic outcomes within the Asian context are less clear. This study investigated (1) the extent to which the development of hot and cool Executive Function (EF) might differ among…

Research Findings: Early childhood educators play an important role in promoting children's social emotional learning (SEL). This study proposes a comprehensive coding scheme to explore teachers' strategies and children's responses in shared book reading (SBR), which create opportunities to share pictures and storylines to examine social…

In the field of early childhood education, play has become synonymous with curriculum but is sometimes viewed narrowly as a pedagogical tool to enhance child development. However, it is known from a range of multidisciplinary work that child-initiated and child-guided forms and contexts of playing can offer rich insight into diversity in…

Research shows that executive functions (EF) and fine motor skills (FMS) contribute to early academic skills, possibly in overlapping ways. We examine whether and how EF and FMS interact in the concurrent prediction of maths, reading and spelling skills at the start of kindergarten. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) on data from 1248…

Teacher talk has been found to significantly affect children's early language development during shared book reading; however, the mechanism of such influence remains unclear. The current study has zoomed in on vocabulary development in Mandarin as a heritage language (HL) in Singapore kindergartens, 1) exploring the linguistic features (i.e.…

The Singapore government has launched kindergarten curriculum reform since 2003 to promote constructivism in teaching and learning, which seems to contradict the traditional pedagogy. Using video analysis, we examined the actual classroom dialogue in six Chinese language classrooms to understand to what extent the constructivist pedagogy has been…