This article describes challenging practicum situations that provided three early childhood education students with leadership opportunities to promote best practices in child care centers. Using excerpts from student journals and meetings, the article documents students' initial discouragement at practices observed, inspiration through…

Large numbers of young children spend significant amounts of time in early childhood educational settings. Concerns about the quality of this experience have increased substantially in recent years. Further, as social inequalities in Australia continue to grow the gap between disadvantage and advantage widens despite overall levels of increased…

The goal of this study was to examine the effect of early childhood mental health consultation on teacher sensitivity over time, taking into account specific characteristics of early childhood mental health consultation that contribute to change in teacher sensitivity. One-hundred and forty-one early childhood teachers, serving economically…

At the same time young babies are developing an understanding of self as separate from others--what it means to be "me"--many also face having to negotiate living, learning, growing, and developing as part of a group--what it means to be "we". This is true for more than half of all infants in the United States under the age of…

This study is an investigation of children's communication skills and socialization by the types of their early education experiences (e.g., child care centers, private schools, public schools, home, or other). A total of 244 children (average age: 61 months) and their parents participated in this study. According to the results of this study,…

Core findings of the ongoing National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study of early child care and youth development through the end of the primary-school years are summarized, highlighting the fact that both positive effects of good quality care on cognitive-linguistic-academic functioning and negative effects of extensive…

This article gives a general picture of the policy and main structural features of early childhood education services for the younger children in Finland. It also provides an overview of the research on 1 to 3-year-old children in day care centres carried out in Finland during the last 15 years, the focus being on a review of all the eight…

Objectives: To describe protocol and interobserver agreements of an instrument to evaluate nutrition and physical activity environments at child care. Methods: Interobserver data were collected from 9 child care centers, through direct observation and document review (17 observer pairs). Results: Mean agreement between observer pairs was 87.26%…

This brief examines how provider training and education are related to parent- and provider-reported indicators of quality in home-based and center-based care for toddlers using data from a nationally representative sample of low-income children. The research addressed three research questions: What are the demographic characteristics that…

Early childhood mental health consultation is a relationship-based intervention that promotes children's social and emotional development. Benefits include improved childhood behaviors, improved staff self-efficacy, and lowered parental stress. Child care center directors are more likely to be satisfied with consultation when they are involved in…

Children in the researcher's rural school district have limited opportunities for a high quality preschool programming that prepares them for school readiness. Quality preschool programming is defined as teachers with proper qualifications and training, small class size, stimulating curriculum, and parent involvement. The theoretical foundation…

The study examined whether preschoolers who were exposed to a media-rich literacy curriculum had better early reading skills than preschoolers who were exposed to a media-rich science curriculum. The study randomly assigned 80 preschool classes to incorporate either a media-rich literacy curriculum or a media-rich science curriculum. The final…

It's true that adults learn differently than children. They have real-life experiences, strong preferences, time constraints, competing priorities, and varied objectives. But, they also share some similarities. Training the adults who work directly with children is the best way to make a positive impact on the children. In this article, the…

Young children learn about safety from a variety of sources, including formal lessons and informal activities provided through early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. For many ECEC centres in Australia, scheduled visits from police and fire departments are a highlight of safety education activities. Such visits offer children the…

This qualitative case study approaches early childhood education and care practices from a socio-spatial point of view. One Finnish daycare group for one- to three-year-olds participated in the study. The ethnographic observations from the practices are analyzed together with the ECE practitioners' audio-recorded team meetings and video-elicited…