Within a Southwestern school system, deficits in early literacy skills exist as is illustrated by kindergarten students not meeting the requirements on the Phonological Awareness and Phonics Inventory (PAPI). To address this deficit in early literacy skills, the school system instituted the use of the Guided Reading Approach (GR); however, it was…

Early childhood education has recently been heralded as the cornerstone of a brighter future for the United States, playing an important role in the healthy development of our youngest children (Perry, 2015; Bornfreund, 2015). However, the teachers of these children face multiple challenges in the profession, including unlivable wages, low morale…

Mobile tablets are becoming more prevalent in educational settings, but little is known about the impact of using technology-infused curricula in preschool classrooms. The research summarized in this brief suggests that well-designed tablet-based activities can indeed improve student learning outcomes at the preschool level. These positive…

Reading proficiently opens doors to college and career pathways. The success of children depends on this fundamental skill, yet students are failing to learn to read. This research investigated the relationship between teacher knowledge of phonemic awareness and the development of early literacy skills in kindergarten students. The study was…

Observational assessment is being used on a large scale to evaluate the quality of interactions between teachers and children in classroom environments. When one performs observations at scale, features of the protocol such as the scheduling of observations can potentially influence observed scores. In this study interactions were observed for 88…

Early childhood care and education in Ireland has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, as a result of public concern about standards in some early years services. Services for children before they enter primary school are largely the responsibility of the department of health, while children in the formal school system are the…

Virtue, according to Aristotle, is doing the right things at the right time with the right people for the right end and in the right way. This concept is central to the work of the Early Learning Initiative, an Irish community-based educational initiative. This paper describes how a community of parents, early childhood care and education…

Contemporary education reforms focus on assessing teachers' performance and developing selection mechanisms for hiring effective teachers. Tools that enable the prediction of teachers' classroom performance promote schools' ability to hire teachers more likely to be successful in the classroom. In addition, these assessment tools can be used for…

The purpose of the study is to investigate the cognitive developmental levels of five- to six-year-old preschool children with regard to their peer relationships. The relational survey method was used in the study. One hundred and fifty one children aged five- to six-years-old participated in the study. The Child Behaviour Scale, Peer…

The parent-teacher agreement has become an important issue of children's psychological assessment. However, the amount of research available for preschool children is small and mainly based on one index of agreement with samples of modest size/representativeness. This study examined parent-teacher agreement (correlations) and discrepancies (t…

This article aims to explore young children's (from one to three years old) perspectives of the role and pedagogy of educators in play in an Icelandic preschool. The intention is to explore the meaning that children put into involving educators in their play and whether the children experience educators' actions as a resource for their play. The…

President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are promoting an early learning initiative focusing on the agenda of every four year old having equal access to high-quality early learning environments (Administration for Children and Families, 2013). One way the Federal government is supporting this proposal is through a grant;…

The aim of this study was to explore preschool children's perceptions of their performance under competitive and non-competitive conditions (NCC) and their satisfaction. Eighty preschool children (40 boys, 40 girls) aged 4-6 years (M age?=?5.48, SD?=?0.57) took part in this study. Preschool children built a tower under competitive and NCC and…

Two longitudinal studies examined the effects of explicit intention, as described in Ajzen's (1991) theory of planned behavior, on preschool teachers' success in enrolling in college. In the first study, 88 low-wage female teachers and teachers' aides who represented 85 child care centers were surveyed about their intentions to pursue college…

Background: Recent studies have suggested that teachers' psychological attributes can be an indicator of teacher quality (Rimm-Kaufman and Hamre in "Dev Psychol" 45(4):958-972. doi: 10.1037/a0015861 , 2010), and teachers' child-centered beliefs have been associated with children's academic achievement (Burchinal and Cryer in "Early…