Providing social skills to children through an appropriate educational programme positively affects their overall development. The aim of this study was to examine the views and experiences of 13 Turkish preschool teachers working with 5-6-year-old children regarding support of children's social skills. An interview protocol was used to gather the…

This study aimed to investigate how 33 preschool teachers' and 30 special educational needs teachers in Swedish preschools documented and described children's speech, language and communication development. The views on concepts as 'scientific basis', 'proven experience' and ways to follow language development for children in need of extra-support…

This article presents a meta-interpretative synthesis of contrasting research studies about methodological and theoretical challenges for Swedish preschool teachers in systematic quality development work. The first challenge involves an awareness of producing documentation from different levels of preschool work. The second challenge concerns…

Although observational instruments are considered to be the gold standard for measuring toddler childcare quality, large-scale studies often have to rely on interviews or questionnaires. However, it remains unclear whether such reports can serve as reliable indicators for childcare quality. The present study used the ITERS and FCCERS to examine…

This study showcases the collaborative work between, on the one side, the Spanish Ministry of Health, Social Services, and Equality and the Federation of Municipalities and Provinces and, on the other side, a consortium of eight Spanish universities. The aims are to implement a positive parenting policy to adopt codes of professional best…

This study presents the descriptive data of a family context assessment carried out using a new instrument which includes a wide range of variables identified in recent scientific literature as influencing children's psychological development. Participants were 772 families with children aged between 7 and 11. The results reveal variability…

The promotion of creativity has been proved a necessity in the education process. The research on creativity in physical education though is very limited worldwide and there is a lack of multilingual evaluation instruments. In the current study, the Creativity Fostering Teacher Index (CFTIndex) was translated and culturally adapted in Greek and…

There is a need for more comprehensive assessments of young children's emerging print knowledge. Traditional letter and numeral identification assessments score children's responses as either correct or incorrect and this approach can underestimate what children know. The present study tested an assessment scale that scored three- and…

In this paper we describe a method for exploring young children's views of illness causality in social context. Studies of children's conceptualisation of illness have predominantly focused on the nature of children's knowledge rather than locating that knowledge within socio-cultural contexts. Adopting a socio-constructivist perspective we sought…

The objective of this study was to develop an instrument to observe the play behaviour of a whole group of children from four to six years of age in a classroom setting on the basis of video recording. The instrument was developed in collaboration with experienced teachers and experts on play. Categories of play were derived from the literature…

A six-year-old child was independently assessed by three licensed educational (school) psychologists and one interdisciplinary team in the UK. All but one of these practitioners believed their assessment to be the first. The aim was to compare the practice of assessors and their conclusions especially in diagnostic categorisation. The methods of…

This study developed a standardised mediated assessment to measure young children's mathematical ability in reasoning, abstraction and representation in number, computation, quantity, shape and relationship through six tasks with four levels. The percentage distribution of children at four levels on the tasks showed that the tiered mediations…

Initial validation data are presented for the Risky Situation (RS), a 20-minute observational procedure designed to assess the father-child activation relationship with children aged 12-18 months. The coding grid, which is simple and easy to use, allows parent-child dyads to be classified into three categories and provides an activation score. By…

This study analyzes the influence of socioeconomic status, quality of family context and sibling status on cognitive development in a sample of 551 five-year-old children. The regression analyses confirmed the predictive value of socioeconomic status and quality of family context on cognitive development. The quality of family context mediates the…

Describes a longitudinal and ecological methodology for evaluating innovation in preschool education which features the involvement of those responsible for the innovation being evaluated. Reviews the use of this methodology in an evaluation of community nursery schools in the Strathclyde region of Scotland. (MDM)