The 2015 edition of the "Annual Condition of Education Report" includes a rich set of information about the status of Iowa's K-12 education system. The report provides valuable feedback about Iowa's students, educators and school districts across a number of statewide measures. They include changes in student populations and…

This paper and the four commissioned works on which it is based are guided by the important question: How can we start valuing practices and outcomes of teaching and learning that are difficult to reduce to numbers? As the process of developing indicators for the Post-2015 education targets unfolds, some of the targets are at risk of being dropped…

Ideas of sustainable development, globalization and global citizenship raise questions about justice, rights, responsibility and caring for human beings and the world. Interest in the role of education for sustainable development has increased during the last decades, however little attention has been directed to early education. Even if the moral…

This article discusses theoretical, methodological and analytical strategies for researching the material subject. The discussion relates to discursive practices in a preschool setting with children of one and two years of age, where the material subject includes both bodily and discursive practices. Using critical ethnography research, the author…

As many countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have developed more universal provision for early childhood education during the last decades, preschool increasingly has become a central policy arena. Gender politics, especially with an aim to promote female labour market participation, but also policies addressing…

This study investigated the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness approach for children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Change in speech, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, word decoding, and spelling skills were examined. A controlled multiple single-subject design was employed. Twelve children aged 4-7 years with…

Purpose: The Hong Kong government recently reformed pre-primary education with the introduction of a voucher scheme. At the time this policy caused considerable opposition from across Hong Kong Society. This paper seeks to use Fairclough's model of critical discourse analysis to explore a key policy text and seeks to assess to what extent such an…

The aim of this article is to initiate a change of view on quality that goes beyond assumed dichotomies of subjectivity and objectivity. In the view presented here, pedagogical quality is seen as an educational phenomenon of "sustainable dynamism," that is a phenomenon that has structural characteristics and is culturally sensitive. The…

This article presents picture books that are considered as a sample of children's literature selections on war, terrorism, and natural disasters for pre-K to 3rd-grade children which were chosen with both young children and their teachers and parents in mind. The authors recommend these books to be used as read-alouds, so that caring adults who…

In recent times there has been an enormous interest in Vygotsky's writing on conceptual development, particularly his insights on the differences between everyday and scientific thinking. In drawing upon cultural-historical theory, this paper seeks to examine the relations between everyday concepts and scientific concepts within playful contexts,…

Panwapa, created by the Sesame Street Workshop of PBS, is an example of an initiative on the Internet designed to enhance students' learning by exposing them to global communities. Panwapa means "Here on Earth" in Tshiluba, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the Panwapa website, www.panwapa.org, children aged…

The aim of this study is to assess the factors that are related to preschool children and their mothers on children's intuitional mathematics abilities. Results of the study showed that there were significant differences in children's intuitional mathematics abilities when children are given the opportunity to think intuitionally and to make…

This article describes an inquiry project in a pre-kindergarten program at a laboratory school at a public university. The Dance Project took form in the pre-kindergarten class at the laboratory school for a public university's early childhood education program. Fourteen imaginative and highly active 4- and 5-year-old children attended the…

Young children living in poor urban neighborhoods are often at risk for reading difficulties, in part because developing listening comprehension strategies and vocabulary knowledge may not be a priority in their prekindergarten classrooms, whose curriculums typically focus heavily on phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge. Prereading…

In 1974, the United States Supreme Court ruled in "Lau v. Nichols" that 1,800 Chinese-speaking children in the San Francisco public schools were entitled to English-language instruction or other support to help them understand what was happening in their classrooms. Thirty-six years later, state and local responsibilities to public…