In this article a study is presented of selective affiliation of two- and three-year-old children in the natural situation of Dutch daycare centers. Data of (behavioral) characteristics of 674 pairs of children (dyads) were collected. Multi-level analyses of these dyadic data were conducted and showed that the chance of friendship between two…

This study examines changes that have transpired in the reflection of gender structuring in children's books over several decades. The issue of gender in the education system, the structuring of gender stereotypes, and their influence on the distribution of roles between males and females in society are discussed. The study examines children's…

As policymakers and early childhood advocates across the United States continue to promote the expansion of early childhood education to prepare students for success in elementary school, many within the field are worried about how these reforms will affect the field. Little is known as to why early education stakeholders would seek out…

This study examines the construct validity of a new teacher interview designed to assess teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for preschool mathematics. PCK describes the subject matter knowledge a teacher needs for effective teaching. Data from 22 teachers and 113 Head Start children in a large midwestern city in the United States were…

As part of a renewed focus on early childhood mathematics education, researchers have recently called for increased attention to preschool mathematics curricula. This article, which is based on a multiyear ethnographic study in a rural preschool primarily serving African American children, contributes to this area of interest by documenting the…

This study was designed to gain insight into how early intervention (EI) services incorporate the cultural and linguistic resources of families and how EI professionals and families build partnerships with each other. Through observation and interview, the author looked deeply at the experiences of a small group of culturally and linguistically…

Preschool children listened to a children's storybook about an animal character, with reading being terminated prior to, or after, problem resolution. The children's empathic understanding of how the animal character felt was assessed, and they were then asked to draw, with strength of pressure on the page (as evident on attached carbon copies)…

The developmental progression hypothesis for phonological awareness states that children perform better on lower level tasks and has been addressed mainly in the literature with children beginning at age 5. In addition, there has been a limited amount of research done regarding the performance of dual-language learners younger than age 5 on…

The Ethiopian government has called for educational improvement, emphasizing the employment of active, student-centered pedagogy. One way of maximizing an interactive learning approach involves blending a cross-age reading buddies program with high-quality, culturally relevant children's literature. Employing descriptive, mixed-method research,…

This article is a response to "Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS): A Tool for Evaluating Student Learning?" by Kamii and Manning (2005). The intent of their study was to evaluate how DIBELS and a writing test predict reading achievement, which was measured by scores on the Slosson Oral Reading Test (SORT) as well as by a…

The purpose of this research was to examine the moderating role of sibling relationship quality in the associations between shyness and indices of socioemotional adjustment in an early childhood education context. Participants were 79 children ages 4 to 6 (M = 4.74 years) who had at least one sibling. Parents completed ratings of child shyness,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the executive function of 4th- to 6th-grade students in three distinctively different private school environments: a Montessori school, a classical school, and a Catholic school. Using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, parent-teacher dyads rated the executive function of 112 students.…

This study investigated the home literacy environments (HLEs) of 4-year-old children attending an early childhood program prior to school entry and the association between the HLE and children's interests in and attitudes to literacy. One hundred and thirty-eight parents and 140 children participated in the study. Parents completed a questionnaire…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) on the reading fluency (RF) of students from traditionally underrepresented groups. The study included 86 participants attending 1st through 4th grade within an inner-city charter school located in a high-poverty, urban…

The discipline and practice of participatory, practice-led research has grown rapidly in recent years and it is now widely accepted as making an important and serious contribution to the knowledge base of early childhood. Despite this progress recently we have come to understand that our worldview has needed to shift again in response to the…