This paper provides a discourse analysis of 12 Swedish sexuality education texts intended for preschool practitioners and published between 1969 and 2021. Using Fairclough's framework, we identify three discourses about children's sexual play in relation to children's sexual agency in the texts: child sexuality as encouraged and entangled with…

Background: When New York City's (NYC) Division of Early Childhood Education (DECE) enacted their historic expansion of free programming for four-year-olds under Pre-K for All, they designed a complex system of professional learning (PL) to support teachers and high-quality programming. This study, developed in partnership between NYU and DECE,…

Engaging in design thinking activities has been increasingly viewed as important for the craft of teaching for early childhood practitioners. However, reliable and valid measurements for this are lacking. As such, this research aims to develop and validate a design thinking engagement scale (DTES) to assess teachers' engagement in design thinking.…

Previous studies highlight the importance of investigate the construction in video-recorded learning situations. The aim of this study is to investigate how video-recordings can be used to enhance pre-service teachers' abilities to identify children's exploration of mathematics in preschools. Even if some previous studies have focused the use of…

The study was conducted using a qualitative research method to examine Montessori preschool education practices in Turkiye. The study group consisted of 14 teachers in Montessori classrooms of preschools in the central district of a province in Turkiye. The data were collected with a Structured Classroom Observation Form, Material Control List and…

This study explores Saudi teachers' beliefs about STEAM education in early childhood education settings. The study sample consisted of 245 teachers working in kindergartens. The participants completed a survey comprising twelve items to elaborate teachers' beliefs toward implementing STEAM practices in their classrooms, as well as four close-ended…

This study explored how a professional development experience changed preschool teachers' perceptions of integrated STEM education. In addition, the research examined what teachers learned about STEM education with this experience. The study employed a qualitative research design, precisely a case study approach. Thirty preschool teachers…

A focus on early literacy that became heightened in the early 21st century has had the unintended consequence of restricting our ideas about what children should be doing in classrooms, creating a preoccupation not only with literacy in general but also with a specific subset of early literacy skills that often reflect Eurocentric cultural norms…

The present research evaluated whether behavioral tasks ("direct assessments") commonly used to assess young children's social cognitive development in laboratory studies could have utility for measuring and predicting U.S. children's outcomes in educational contexts. To do so, children (N = 95; 49 boys, 46 girls; 41.05% White, 16.84%…

Paired field placement is an important element of teacher education where student teachers can acquire professional cooperative skills through team teaching. However, little is known about challenges that student teachers face during team teaching. Also, knowledge about challenges during the team teaching process (e.g. planning, instruction,…

The articles contained in this three-article dissertation carefully document characteristics of early childhood (EC) classrooms that could be beneficial to early learning and success. These articles use multiple regression, descriptive statistics, and multi-level modeling in their methodology and make recommendations for policy in the field of…

This research explored early literacy teachers' perceptions regarding their professional development experiences and their level of self-efficacy in teaching reading. Teacher perceptions were measured using an adapted professional development perception survey created by Lowden (2003) based on Guskey's (2000) previous research on professional…

Research Findings: Comprehensive art education (CAE) can be an effective way to develop children's creativity development. However, little is known about how CAE is implemented in kindergarten classrooms in China. The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of CAE activity implementation. To assess the effectiveness of CAE in terms…

Early childhood research and policy have promoted the use of language and literacy assessment data to inform instruction. Yet, there is a limited understanding of preschool teachers' data practices and sensemaking, particularly when considered from the perspectives of practicing teachers. In this multicase study, we used a phenomenological…

Theory and research point to the daily interactions between individual children and teachers as formative to teacher-child relationships, yet observed dyadic teacher-child interactions in preschool classrooms have largely been overlooked. This study provides a descriptive examination of the quality of individual children's interactions with their…