"Communities of practice" is a concept employed by Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (2015) to refer to "groups of people who share a… passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly" (p. 1). In the museum context, a community-of-practice model provides educators the opportunity to…

This paper draws on the social ecology of Félix Guattari, to suggest that young children learn in complex social and natural situations, in this case 'getting muddy'. The notion of social ecology will be revived in this paper, to ensure that the human social world is embedded in and part of the natural world, with all its complexities, relations…

Perceptions of parents of young children receiving early intervention are important to understand. Parents have valuable opinions on the delivery of early interventions services and can provide critical feedback that can help professionals revise their existing early intervention delivery modalities. In the current study, we examined the…

The present study examined how children spontaneously represent facial cues associated with emotion. 106 three- to six-year-old children (48 male, 58 female; 9.4% Asian, 84.0% White, 6.6% more than one race) and 40 adults (10 male, 30 female; 10% Hispanic, 30% Asian, 2.5% Black, 57.5% White) were recruited from a Midwestern city (2019-2020), and…

The authors argue for an expansive and inclusive approach to literacy instruction that moves beyond multimodality to embrace multiplicity in readers, texts, mediums, activities, environments, and contexts aligned to our 21st century world. In particular, rather than privileging the linguistic mode, the authors argue for using all modes and…

In this paper, we present a descriptive case study of the Mobeybou materials, a kit of tangible and digital tools aimed at offering young children opportunities to read, create and share intercultural stories. The tools comprise a set of story apps that present interactive, multimodal and intercultural stories for children to make meanings with, a…

Children's citizenship in early childhood education and care is the root of democracy, equity, and sustainability. In Aotearoa New Zealand, "Te Whariki" has a strong aspiration for children as competent and active citizens. Early childhood settings are sites where children may have opportunities to act as powerful citizens. Employing…

Numerous studies have shown a significant positive relationship between the mental representation of hands in young children and their calculation performance. The literature indicates that certain components of manual motor skills may be critical to the quality of this relationship. The main objective of this study is to measure the benefit of an…

The study's purpose was to examine the contribution of a programmable robot to an intervention program for promoting spatial ability (spatial relations, visual-memory, mental rotation) of preschool children. Eighty-four participants were randomly assigned to three intervention groups: programmable-robot-based intervention, traditional…

Number line estimation (NLE) tasks are widely used to investigate numerical cognition, learning, and development, and as an instructional tool. Interpretation of these tasks generally involves an implicit expectation that responses are driven by the overall magnitudes of target numerals, in the sense that the particular digits conveying those…

Books communicate information to children about social norms, including those associated with eating and foods. This, combined with concern about high rates of child obesity, was the impetus for this study. Information is presented on the food messages in a sample of contemporary popular books written for young children. Highly sweetened products…

Adults commonly conceptualize intentional harms as worse than accidental harms. We probed the developmental trajectory of this pattern and asked whether U.S. children (4 - to 7-year-olds) and adults expected other agents -- including another person and God -- to share their views. In contrast with some prior work, even the youngest children in the…

In this study, we aimed to understand what readiness meant to educators in two districts that were in the midst of developing pre-K-3 initiatives. We examined how readiness was conceptualized by teachers, school leaders, and district leaders as well as what factors influenced their understandings. We found that educators in our study tended to…

Visual working memory (WM) plays a pivotal role in integrating fragments into meaningful units, but no study has addressed how visual WM integration takes place in children. The current study examined whether WM integration emerges once preschoolers master Gestalt cue and can retain two representations in WM (automatic integration hypothesis), or…

This article presents an intervention proposal that seeks to develop computational thinking in Early Childhood Education, using an educational ground robot with programmed directionality controls. Within the observational methodology, it has been possible to characterize computational thinking in children of Early Childhood Education -- 5 years…