This study argues that children require social literacy to protect and sustain their play: In play, they construct an emotional landscape of "we"-ness to be protected from outsiders. The research consisted of a 4-month-long investigation, which involved audiotaping and videotaping children engaged in self-initiated play in a kindergarten class at…

Fifty 1-to 3-year-olds were asked to imitate: (1) the rolling of a cylinder down an incline and (2) the making of an incline with a board and a block. Their incorrect imitations and progress were videotaped and analyzed, and interpreted in light of Piaget's theory about the elaboration of logico-mathematical relationships in an interrelated way.…

This study constructed questionnaire measures of cooperative and competitive orientations, and pilot-tested them with 1,176 elementary school-age 4-H members and non-members. A measure of parent support was also obtained from these children. Factor analyses revealed that competitive and cooperative learning orientations are orthogonal and not…

The purpose of this study was to investigate factors that contribute to individual differences in the school performance of 2nd-grade children born to adolescent mothers. The sample of this study was 90 low-income adolescent mothers and their children. Data were collected from the adolescent mothers and their first-born children, now in 2nd grade,…

This study examines the role of curriculum as a vocabulary learning environment by comparing teacher's Large Group Time instruction in two curricula--Creative Curriculum (Dodge, Colker, & Heroman, 2000) and the Doors to Discovery program (2002). Discourse samples were retrieved from the video data of the Large Group Time activity in five Head…

The purpose of this study was to compare the academic achievement of 543 urban 4th- (n=291) and 8th- (n=252) grade students who attended Montessori or traditional education programs. The majority of the sample consisted of minority students (approximately 53 percent), and was considered low income (approximately 67 percent). Students who attended…

Although widely implemented, the effectiveness of the Even Start program and other programs involving home-visiting and bilingual education in improving preschool literacy outcomes, particularly among Latino students, is uncertain. This study used a non-equivalent groups design to compare preschool literacy outcomes (measured by the PALS-PreK…

This portion of a larger comparative study of full day kindergarten (FDK) versus half-day kindergarten (HDK) classrooms highlights the effects of FDK versus HDK on the achievement of students with low/moderate income status. Authors collected statistical and semi-structured interview data from one large and two other school corporations in the…

The purpose of this study was to further test the psychometric properties of a scale developed to measure children's perceptions of their after-school teacher and to understand the scale's relationship to the quality of the school-age child care program. Eleven after-school programs were observed and rated on program quality, and 146 children…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how early childhood teachers in Korea understand developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) and follow DAP's instructional guidelines. In order to obtain insights for developing "educare," an integrated system for the education and care of young children in Korea, a comparison of early childhood…

This issue highlights five distinct studies. The first study looks at achievement and its association to Montessori programs, magnet programs, and traditional schooling programs. The second provides evidence on the efficacy of the Even Start program in comparison to Title I programs. The third examines the effects of full-day and half-day…

This paper describes the development, administration, and scoring of the Pictorial Measure of School Stress (PMSS). This instrument was designed to describe individual differences in children's feelings about everyday school situations and their coping strategies for dealing with these. The PMSS uses a semi-structured interview to present specific…

Government commitment to the care and education of children from birth to three years in England led to the commissioning in 2001 of "a framework of best practice" (DfEE, 2001:24) to support children in their earliest years. The resulting framework of "effective" practice, together with supporting materials, was developed by a team based at…

While researchers have paid a lot of attention to dimensions of quality transcending the content of education, in the course of the last decade a lot of attention has been invested by policy makers in the description of the kind of learning that is expected from schools (not in the least in the early years). That is why the topic of curriculum…

Research has increasingly highlighted the importance of children's social and cultural experiences for understanding about learning, what is learned and what is perceived as being important for learning. The development of literacy learning begins well before children start school as they engage in the literate practices of their homes and…