The "Starting School Research Project", based at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, promotes the involvement of children in research concerning their transition to school. Using examples of approaches that have been utilised to engage children as part of the research on their transition to school, this paper explores some of the…

This special issue of "Early Child Development and Care" focuses on the issues involved in researching the views and experiences of young children. Challenging issues need to be addressed. For example, what constitutes ethical questioning of children? What are young children's rights as research respondents? What is meaningful 'informed consent'…

The objective of this research was learning about the chosen aspects of self-knowledge in 8-year-old children, evoked through self-presentation of the public and private self. The issues considered dealt with particular, significant features of "personal narrative" analysed through both the content and the form of the self-presentation utterance.…

To increase preschoolers' science and mathematics learning experiences both within and outside the classroom, we developed age-appropriate materials containing general questions and instructions that teachers and parents could use when interacting with their students and children. The questions and instructions were related to a specific science…

One of the responsibilities involved with teaching is disciplining, an area where teachers teach their male and female students in accord with their beliefs and expectations as to which behaviors are appropriate in which situations. In this study, teachers? beliefs about the use of appropriate discipline philosophies for the misbehaviors of male…

In the theoretical part of this paper, the author gives answers to the question of whether a real attachment relationship can exist between a child and a non-maternal caretaker. She introduces diagnostic meaning of children's drawings. The purpose of the study was to investigate how children's social behavior and their attachment to the…

Individual differences in temperament and personality influence children's development of self-regulation, social relationships, and adaptation within varied contexts. For young children with disabilities and/or family poverty, early school experiences provide both significant challenges and opportunities. In this study, teachers rated the…

This paper discusses the potential of the childcare centre as a child-rearing niche and is based on data collection and research carried out in childcare centres. The everyday experiences of infants were recorded on video over a period of eighteen months. These experiences were coded using a number of communicative language categories as well as…

Providing families with information about infant sleep can positively impact parents' well-being and infants' sleep habits. Few parents receive professionally based information about sleep, perhaps due to contradictory information found in the literature. This review summarizes: (1) normative sleep patterns for infants; (2) factors that affect…

This study, on one hand, reviews different strategies applied in Romania regarding the assessment of the children with special educational needs; on the other hand, it takes into account the relationship between assessment and formative learning on Piaget's theoretical basis. Finally, several standardized forms of assessment designed for the…

This research had three main goals: to control whether children would show significant improvement in cognitive test scores following piano/keyboard instruction; to compare whether the spatial tasks would show greater improvement than other tasks; and to examine whether the effects of piano/keyboard training on spatial tasks are gender…

This study contains a series of arguments regarding the necessity to reform the special educational system and to simultaneously develop an integrated educational system, starting from the need to maintain the special schools while giving them new functions and roles. We present a synthesis of the trends to follow through which existing Romanian…

Loss of hearing seriously affects individual development. Especially, a profound loss of hearing has effects in the evolution of a child's verbal language. Keeping in mind the level of the loss of hearing, a specific educational and recovering methodology has been adopted: on one hand, the stimulation of the hearing potential and the achieving of…

This article focuses on the global and African postures on the issues of child abuse and child labour. The global ethical ideals of the issues are characterized within their various theoretical perspectives while the African cultural realities are explored through the use of focus group discussion sessions, which were organized in six rural…

Romanian special education finds its beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century at the same time as the constitution of the modern state and the efforts of gradual opening to new European reforming ideas. For this period it is worth mentioning the Shelter for children and old people set up by Elena Cuza (1862), the wife of Ruler…