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…

The development of emotional competence is an important milestone during early childhood. Beyond early experience within the family, the (preschool) classroom is a relevant socialisation context, and both teachers and peers may contribute to children's emotion-related outcomes. Tracking changes in the emotion regulation competence of N = 173…

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…

Background: Distance education is a science-based system that supports learner independence through technology. Purpose: The aim of this study is to evaluate the distance education system according to the experiences of prospective teachers studying the preschool education curriculum. Methodology/Approach: The research was conducted with a…

The promotion of Social emotional learning (SEL) in elementary schools has increased; however, little is known about early childhood teachers' perceptions about the effectiveness of their elementary school's approach to SEL. The present study used mixed methods methodology to explore the perceptions of 1154 preschool through second grade teachers…

The validity of the Kappa coefficient of chance-corrected agreement has been questioned when the prevalence of specific rating scale categories is low and agreement between raters is high. The researchers proposed the Lambda Coefficient of Rater-Mediated Agreement as an alternative to Kappa to address these concerns. Lambda corrects for chance…

This study used a modified mixed-method sequential explanatory design to explore how preschool teachers perceive and use complex talk within different activity settings and content areas to facilitate language and literacy skills. The combination of large-scale, quantitative data (455 children, 63 teachers) from a pre-K study and in-depth,…

Texting-based programs are increasingly used to support parents as their child's first teacher and create links between home and school. However, there is scant evidence about the influence of program implementation on parent uptake and attrition--a key component of such programs. This article describes the design and delivery of Kindytxt, a…

This research followed a qualitative design to identify preschool teachers' mindsets about workload-related stress. Twenty in-service Chinese preschool teachers were invited to delineate their perceived workload-related stress consequences. Directed by a hybrid of inductive and conductive approaches, we conducted thematic content analyses on two…