This study leverages nationally representative data (N ≈ 6,000) to examine the magnitude of quality differences between (a) formal and informal early childhood education and care providers; (b) Head Start, prekindergarten, and other center-based care; and (c) programs serving toddlers and those serving preschoolers. It then documents differences in children's reading and math skills at age 5 be...

The study was designed to determine whether outer-directedness, measured by glances at E during object assembly tasks administered according to the Turnure and Zigler (1964) procedure, predicts changes in preschoolers' Binet IQs over 6 months. With MA as a covariate to control for the small but significant relationship betweeen glances and developmental level, an ANOCOVA showed a significant in...

Pragmatic behavior, or the socially appropriate use of language, is important to parents of preschool children. In 1994 Becker noted several questions that still remain to be answered, including issues such as developmental changes in the pragmatic teaching of preschoolers and whether there are differences in the parents' goals for pragmatic teaching in private versus public interactions. The p...

The authors argue that imitation is a flexible and adaptive learning mechanism in that children do not always reproduce all of the details they can from a demonstration. Instead, they vary their replications depending on their interpretation of the situation. Specifically, the authors propose that when children do not understand the overall reason for a model's behavior, they will be more likel...

The authors examine black, white, and Hispanic children's differing experiences in early childhood care and education and explore links between these experiences and racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness. Children who attend center care or preschool programs enter school more ready to learn, but both the share of children enrolled in these programs and the quality of care they receive diff...

BACKGROUND Nearly one in five 4-year-old children in the United States are obese, with low-income children almost twice as likely to be obese as their middle/upper-income peers. Few obesity prevention programs for low-income preschoolers and their parents have been rigorously tested, and effects are modest. We are testing a novel obesity prevention program for low-income preschoolers built on t...

Prosocial behavior is arguably influenced by an interaction between intrinsic dispositions (e.g., group bias) and extrinsic factors (e.g., institutional regulations). The current study investigated this interaction developmentally. Preschoolers (3- to 4-year-olds) and kindergarteners (5- to 6-year-olds; N = 111) participated in a resource distribution task in which they had to consider both the...

We address the issue of children's understanding of abstract words with two studies on preschoolers' knowledge of the time-duration words minutes, hours, days, and years. The first study examines 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to answer questions about durations of common phenomena with duration terms. The second study examines 4- to 6-year-olds' comprehension of duration terms with a forced-choic...

see, Florida, USA, were notified of a laboratory-confirmed pertussis case in a 1-year-old preschool attendee. During a 5-month period, 26 (22%) students 1–5 years of age, 2 staff from the same preschool, and 11 family members met the national case definition for pertussis. Four persons during this outbreak were hospitalized for clinical management of Sustained Transmission of Pertussis in Vacci...