Purpose: It is essential to develop and improve instruments that measure and assess children's attitudes towards the elderly. Despite the degree of questions related to this topic, no tools validated for the Portuguese population on the subject were found in the literature. Consequently, this study aimed to translate and validate a scale designed…

Background: Many studies have examined which kindergarteners' skills best predict reading acquisition later at school. Most of these studies focused on emergent literacy skills such as letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and oral language abilities as the basis for reading acquisition. Additionally, several studies have also found cognitive…

TOOLBOX is a school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) program to teach and reinforce 12 tools (e.g., Breathing Tool, Courage Tool) for healthy youth development. Although TOOLBOX has been broadly adopted, it remains largely untested. This quasi-experimental study aims to examine the relationship between TOOLBOX implementation and the…

The present study aims to examine the issue of peer aggression and victimisation in early childhood, with a focus on the associated social behaviour strategies (aggressiveness, prosociality, dominance and social insecurity). A sample of 227 children (58.1% girls, n = 132) between the ages of 4 and 7 years (M = 5.61; SD = 1. 03) participated in the…

This study examined the implementation of a biodanza program in a kindergarten for five-year-olds. The purpose of the project was to understand the contribution of biodanza to social-emotional learning (SEL) of kindergarten children. The exposure of children to biodanza made it possible to stimulate a social-emotional aspects of children's…

The changing landscape of early childhood education related to accountability-driven assessments is creating the need to understand how these changes effect engagement. Children's engagement in school is one of the leading predictors of learning (Carini et al. in Research in Higher Education 47(1):1-32, 2006; Fredricks et al. in Review of…

In the literature in recent years, a number of developmental studies have demonstrated the importance of children entering the school environment with a solid foundation of mathematical content knowledge and argued that problem solving, as an important mathematical process, should be acknowledged in early childhood mathematical education. However,…

Language development is an important facet of early life. Deaf children may have exposure to various languages and communication modalities, including spoken and visual. Previous research has documented the rate of growth of English skills among young deaf children, but no studies have investigated the rate of ASL acquisition. The current paper…

Preverbal infants spontaneously represent the number of objects in collections. Is this 'sense of number' (also referred to as Approximate Number System, ANS) part of the cognitive foundations of mathematical skills? Multiple studies reported a correlation between the ANS and mathematical achievement in children. However, some have suggested that…

This study investigates perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel /e/-/[epsilon]/ contrast by two groups of 4.5-year-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual children, differing in language dominance. Perception was assessed with an XAB discrimination task involving familiar words and non-words. Production accuracy was measured using a familiar-word…

Even once children can accurately remember their experiences, they nevertheless struggle to use those memories in flexible new ways--as in when drawing inferences. However, it remains an open question as to whether the developmental differences observed during both memory formation and inference itself represent a fundamental limitation on…

Empathy can be a powerful means for positive social change and for caring action toward wildlife and nature. Thus, there is a need for interventions that build the capacity of early childhood educators to support empathy development in young children, given the critical developmental period of early childhood and the relevance of empathy to…

This study explored and analyzed the phonological and phonemic awareness components of a teacher edition of a school district's kindergarten language arts curriculum material. Criteria for this pragmatic content analysis were derived from the research on phonological awareness and the sequence of instruction and intervention (Schuele and Boudreau,…

This article compares findings from two national surveys of remote learning for children 2-5 years old during school year one (2019-2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic to school year two (2020-2021) of the COVID-19 pandemic. The refined survey contains 45 closed-ended and five open-ended items covering seven domains: (a) demographic information; (b)…

The author draws on Lev S. Vygotsky's conception of play and Gunilla Lindqvist's methodology concerning the aesthetics of play to discuss play practice in early childhood classrooms. Based on the study of an educational experiment at a primary school, she discusses how children in a school setting simultaneously engage in developed forms of…