The National Literacy Trust's 2018 report on letter writing highlighted the enduring appeal of writing letters to connect people. Many children and young people also said that they write letters to make the person they are writing to happy. This has never been truer now. This report of responses to a survey from early 2021 shows that children and…

Children entering elementary school require considerable transition support from parents and teachers. However, most studies on preschool-elementary school transition have focused on Western contexts. Therefore, this study investigates children's perceptions of elementary school in South Korea before and after entering school. The study sample…

Nonverbal behavior is a ubiquitous, everyday cue that is often used as a basis for social evaluation. Numerous studies indicate that children are sensitive to these signals and form evaluative judgments after viewing positive or negative nonverbal cues directed toward a target. Furthermore, they generalize these judgments to other members of a…

Optimism is linked to persistence and resilience in adults; however, how optimism might relate to children's evaluations of potentially challenging situations and risk-taking behaviors is unknown. This study examined the role of optimism in 4- to 8-year-old children's (N = 121) perceptions of and willingness to engage in physical activities that…

Early childhood/educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world.…

The purpose of the study is to examine young children's (4- to 7-year-old) selective trust decisions in two different data sets; one was for selecting from whom to ask information and the other was for interpersonal trust decision where children encountered with two research assistants; one provided precise and the other provided relative…

This research investigates positive future expectancies, particularly hope in children, which is comprised of agency thinking, perceiving oneself as capable of achieving goals, and pathways thinking, perceiving oneself as capable of discovering methods toward the desired goals. Two studies (n = 82) were conducted in the United States to examine…

During the course of a program evaluation for Footprints Dance Project Society of Alberta, we uncovered a discrepancy between children and parents regarding both motivation for program participation and expected outcomes. At Footprints Dance Project, we work with a diverse group of children, primarily from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Despite…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children's theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We asked these questions in the context of children's…

Previous research about refugee students' experiences with online learning has focused on the challenges faced by refugee youth, their families, and schools without addressing what strengths families might bring to this type of learning. Further, while previous research has touched upon refugee youth and their families' substantial digital…

This study describes how 3- to 8-year-olds' justifications for their reality status judgements about people on YouTube relates to their age and previous YouTube watching experience. Using a within-subjects design, children were asked about their beliefs regarding the reality status of a purported YouTube video and provided justifications for their…

Children have a robust social preference for people similar to them, like those who share their language, accent, and race. In the present research, we show that this preference can diminish when children consider who they want to learn about. Across three experiments, 4- to 6-year-olds (total N = 160; 74 female, 86 male, from the Waterloo region…

Children are sensitive to their own and others' epistemic states and use these to guide their learning and communication. Here, we systematically examined children's use of epistemic states to make diagnostic social inferences. Specifically, we investigated children's group membership inferences based on what others do and do not know and what…

Exchanges of help between children are common and often have positive consequences. But not all help is equally beneficial, for example because some help does not provide an opportunity to practice and develop skills. Here I examine whether young children might perpetuate competence-based inequality by providing incompetent peers with less…

This article focuses on children's opinions (aged 7-12) regarding their views on intercultural non-formal education activities carried out by Polish non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The study was conducted through unstructured interviews, with 65 participants. The results of the research show that, thanks to its character (active learning),…