The Solomon Islands, a small developing nation in the South Pacific, demonstrates an emerging community-based kindergarten model with the potential to promote context and culture relevant early learning and development, despite deeply embedded foundations in colonial legacies. Based on the Kahua region of Makira-Ulawa Province, this collaborative,…

This paper explores teachers' ethnotheories of the "ideal student" in five western societies: Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the US. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to derive culture-specific profiles of the "ideal student" as described by kindergarten and primary school teachers in semi-structured interviews (sample n's…

In this paper we argue that the socialist kindergarten in Hungary (1948-1989) was set up to aid the modernizing of a nation in a particular way and in a historical and political context in which the only way forward was to leave behind aspects of the past and start a new chapter in Hungarian history. Comparing this project to the…

In this article, the author offers a causal explanation for the preschool education voucher policy in Taiwan. A causal analysis of voucher politics focuses on the process rather than the result of the innovation. The political success of private kindergarten business interests derives from their capability to open a space for collective…

This study examined the degrees of congruence between two early childhood evaluation systems on various quality concepts: the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) and Zhejiang's Kindergarten Quality Rating System (KQRS). Analysis of variance and post hoc least significant difference tests were employed to show the extent…

At the time of the development of the new curriculum in Slovenia, international comparative data providing information on the performance of Slovene students as compared to other relevant countries were available from a limited number of assessments. For this reason, it was even more important that additional international comparisons were…

This article profiles Juana P. Manso, who was a writer, translator, journalist, teacher and precursor of feminism in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. In 1840 she moved with her family to Montevideo (Uruguay), exiled under the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas, who was governing the territory of the United Provinces of the River Plate. During Rosas'…

The year 2004 is the centenary of the first official kindergarten in China. During this 100 years of development, early childhood education in China has experienced two big developmental spurts, first at the beginning of the twentieth century and then again at the turn of the twenty-first century. The argument presented by this paper is that…

The article discusses kindergarten and primary school teachers' preferences for instructional approaches and teaching practices. One hundred and thirty-three teachers from Estonia completed questionnaires. The results showed that the promotion of students' comprehension and independence, enhancing practical application and individualisation of…