Compared with the former policies on early childhood education, the policies recently issued in mainland China clearly defined early childhood education as an integral part of education and social public welfare and stipulated the responsibilities of the government in its development, shifting the developmental orientation to promoting social…

The authors present the development and the validation of the four-dimensional, twenty-five-item, five-point Kindergarten Environment Rating Scale (KERS). The Cohen's Kappa of the items indicates acceptable reliability for the instrument. The content validity and confirmatory factor analysis indicates that the data obtained using the KERS could…

Kindergarten children's perception of play is a reflection of their life and experiences, which can be used as an index of the quality of pre-school provision and the influence of kindergarten education reform that began in the 1980s in mainland China. Therefore, based on this hypothesis, the current authors argue that to examine young children's…

The goals of this research were to describe the daily life of children and teachers in Chinese kindergarten programmes, to better understand how teacher-child interactions affect both teachers and children. The main assumption guiding this research was that teacher-child interaction is one of the most important processes in early childhood…