Although phonemic awareness is an essential skill in learning to decode written words, practitioners may question which phonemic awareness tasks best operationalize their relationship with orthographic mapping, the process that converts a decoded word into one instantly recognized on sight. Tests from the "Woodcock-Johnson IV" were used…

For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children's…

This study examined the interrelationships among playfulness, prosocial skills, and school readiness of Hong Kong kindergarten children across time. Participants were 106 local children (55.6% boys, mean age = 60.0 months) and their parents and teachers. At time 1, parents reported their child's age, gender, and playfulness. Six months later at…

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between motor skills and fluid intelligence in children aged 5-7 years. In this cross-sectional study, 115 children between 5 and 7 years of age (preschool children with sports skill learning) were included (51 boys, 44.34%), and fluid intelligence was measured using the Wide Range of Intelligence…

Family childcare (FCC), one of the most widely used childcare provision, is important to children's short and long-term development. FCC quality is receiving more attention in policy and international studies, although additional literature reviews are needed. This study is a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify relevant literature on…

Many scholars have argued that mathematics classrooms often offer narrow conceptions of mathematical excellence, recognizing only some kinds of thinking and some kinds of people as valuable, and conflating mathematical aptitude with overall intelligence. Play offers the potential to disrupt such classroom mathematical practices, by offering new…

During a five-week research study, a kindergarten class of 14 five- and six-year-old children learned to sing and play soprano ukuleles. The study had a dual purpose: to teach the children foundational music skills, and to teach them to read lyrics at the emergent reader level. Csikszentmihalyi (2009) cites one of the pitfalls of traditional music…

The Finnish education system has garnered significant international interest due to its consistently high rankings for decades. However, the same level of interest has not been extended to the country's early childhood education system. In Finland, early childhood education and care are regarded as the cornerstones of the Finnish education system,…

A body of research that investigates the social, cognitive and emotional effects of digital technologies on the development of children reports that digital technologies are limiting activities that connect children with people. On the other hand, there is a great amount of research on the positive role of digital play. However, digital games per…

Computational models of reading have tended to focus on the cognitive requirements of mapping among written, spoken, and meaning representations of individual words in adult readers. Consequently, the alignment of these computational models with behavioural studies of reading development has to date been limited. Models of reading have provided us…

Which dimension of a set of objects is more salient to young children: number or size? The "Build-A-Train" task was developed and used to examine whether children spontaneously use a number or physical size approach on an un-cued matching task. In the Build-A-Train task, an experimenter assembles a train using one to five blocks of a…

Relational language is thought to influence mathematical skills. This study examines the association between "relational language" and "number relation skills"--knowledge of cardinal, ordinal, and spatial principles--among 104 U.S. kindergartners (5.9 years; 44% boys; 37% White, 25% Black, 14% Asian, 24% other) in the 2017-2018…

This study investigated differences between the ability to judge surface emotions and real emotions in pretend/deceptive situations. Using the scenario approach, our results showed that the ability to judge surface/real emotions is affected by pretend and deceptive situations in children aged 4--6 years. We found that in pretend situations, the…

How do educators talk about trauma with young children? Specifically, how do they address children's secondhand experiences of crimes against humanity? In this article, Cara E. Furman argues that classrooms for young children must witness these experiences. A genre of picture books that Furman terms "eavesdropping texts" offer testimony…

Past research has shown that children are more likely to seek out and remember facts about kinds (e.g. "tarsiers hunt for birds") than individuals (e.g. "this tarsier likes to sing"), underscoring the importance of kind-based information in human cognition. However, children also often care about and learn facts about…