How parent-child interaction effectively supports children's bilingual heritage language development in a shared book-reading practice is an under-researched area. The in-depth study reported in this paper examined an episode of one child, a four-year-old girl and her father, reading an English story in Chinese. Approximately 70 hours of video…

Research has shown that the care and education of infants and toddlers is an under-represented area in early childhood teacher education. This is also the case in Australia, meaning that pre-service teachers have few opportunities for learning about infants and toddlers and thus tend to have limited theoretical and practical knowledge about…

Much research has been conducted on children's self-talk and its use to regulate thinking and behaviour, but research has typically been conducted on audible self-talk when undertaking specific tasks designed by researchers and in laboratory situations. Addressing the need to study self-talk in the classroom and by students of an age when…

The social situation of development (SSD) specific to each age determines regularly the whole picture of the child's life. Therefore, we need to learn about the whole context surrounding children relevant to their development. The focus of the study is to understand parent's views on infant-toddler's science concept formation in the family…

Children attending centre-based early childhood care and education programmes across Australia are most likely to be grouped according to age and development. While multi- or mixed-age grouping has been seen to have positive benefits on young children's learning and pro-social behaviours, this approach is not usually adopted in the organisation of…

Children's early years are critical for development and many children access out-of-home care during this time. Services offering high-quality childcare afford an opportunity to impact positively on children's development, including acquisition of communication skills. A strong, responsive relationship between child and carer is important in…

This study aims to examine social competence of Chinese immigrant children and its associations with age, length of attendance in childcare, gender, generational status and proficiencies in English and Mandarin Chinese. One hundred Mandarin-speaking children aged three to five years from 15 childcare centres in Sydney were assessed by normed…

This comparative study investigated the perspectives of preschool teachers in Australia, Denmark, Estonia, German, Greece and Sweden about learning and participation in preschool. A structured survey questionnaire investigated four main questions: What situations can be characterised as learning? What activities are important for learning? What…

Self-determination theorists argue that parents can support or thwart their children's psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence. The first aim of this study was to develop a measure to assess six dimensions of parenting theoretically linked to meeting toddlers' needs. The second aim was to examine the associations of these…

This study describes engagement in and stability of physical activity and sedentary behaviours in early life, and assesses associations with sex, maternal education and developmental stage. Maternal-report data at child age 4, 9 and 20 months were collected from 542 families in the Melbourne Infant Feeding Activity and Nutrition Trial Program.…

Parents play an influential role in children's emotional development. Numerous quantitative studies have examined the correlations between a "single" dimension of parents' emotion socialisation practices (e.g. parental emotion expression or attitudes) and children's emotional development. However, little attention has been paid to a…

Participatory research methods aim to break down the distinction between researchers and the researched. Infants are increasingly being seen as participants in research, but the nature of their participation is being questioned following an increased interest in participatory research with children. This article offers a perspective on…

This paper presents the findings of a research project investigating the perceptions and expectations held by pre-service teachers regarding the childcare sector. It presents the views of a group of pre-service teachers both before and after their exposure to practice within childcare following a 10-week practicum. The personal experiences of the…

PreschoolThis study investigated the nature of parent involvement and parent-educator communication in prior-to-school early childhood settings and school, to explore relations to social capital variables and consistencies and changes in practices over time. Parent interview and teacher questionnaire data from two waves of the Longitudinal Study…

In this study, the pedagogical decision-making processes of 21 Australian early childhood teachers working with children experiencing parental separation and divorce were examined. Transcripts from interviews and a focus group with teachers were analysed using grounded theory methodology. The findings showed that as teachers interacted with young…