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Early childhood is a period of rapid brain development that paves the way for growth of self-regulation skills. This brief builds on reviews of the theoretical and intervention literature to provide early childhood leaders such as program administrators with guidelines for promoting self-regulation development in children aged birth through 5 years, both programmatically and through supportive environmental contexts. The brief is based on work conducted by the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), described in a series of four reports referenced throughout the brief, which can be accessed online at https://www.acf.hhs.gov/opre/research/project/toxic-stress-and-self-regulation-reports.

Acquisition in general and first language acquisition in particular is a very complex and a multifaceted phenomenon. The way that children acquire a language in a very limited period is astonishing. Various approaches have been proposed so far to account for this extraordinary phenomenon. These approaches are indeed based on various philosophical positions that might have quite different underlying assumptions. In the present paper, major approaches to first language acquisition, i. e., empiricism and nativism are reviewed and critically evaluated.

This issue of ETS Policy Notes (Vol. 20, No. 4) provides highlights from the symposium, "Middle School Matters: Improving the Life Course of Black Boys" held on July 23-24, 2012. The second in a series of four symposia co-sponsored by ETS and the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), the seminar examined the education and status of African-American boys, ages 9 to 13.

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to examine preservice teacher's knowledge bases and beliefs about literacy and the impact of their personal reading experiences on literacy instruction. Methodology: This study utilized mixed methodology. This included survey data and open coding. Data were collected using a survey, an annotated DRTA lesson plan, and a personal reading experience narrative. Results: The research reports that there are differences among beliefs concerning early literacy instruction and assessment of preservice teachers before the reading methods course. Conclusions: Preservice teachers are moderately familiar with knowledge bases concerning early literacy instruction and assessment before the reading methods courses. Recommendations: Further studies of the impact on foundations courses such as early childhood education and child psychology are warranted, as they seem to inform curriculum methods courses. (A bibliography is included.)

To reflect on the mathematics achievement of children engaging "Algebra and Analogies for Kids," the teacher researcher will explore the following inquiry: What happens when kids display analogical thinking in an algebra project? Specifically, the proposed study will examine the reasoning of five children in portfolios of best works and selected performance assessments. Their intellectual products will engage replicated Piagetian tasks for analogical reasoning in mathematics vis a vis his reflecting abstraction model. Fourth in a series of occasional papers that explore thinking and learning, this document includes a 28 item annotated bibliography.

In most ways the island nations of Iceland and Singapore could not be more different from each other: Iceland is sparsely populated, located near the Arctic Circle, and a very free and individualistic democratic society; Singapore is densely populated, located near the equator, and a very regulated and collectivist meritocracy. But both nations promote the optimal education and development of children. These two countries are child-centered and responsive to the physical, psychosocial, and cognitive development of young people. This monograph describes the societal conditions, cultural values, and school contexts in Iceland and Singapore that have led to prosocial values, enthusiasm for learning, and academic achievement among young adolescents. Sources of information were observations, interviews, questionnaires, drawings, cultural experts, academic studies, and international government reports. In international comparisons, adolescents from Iceland scored second of twenty-eight countries and significantly higher than youth from the USA on measures of reading engagement. Adolescents from Singapore scored first of forty-one countries and significantly higher than adolescents from the USA on tests of mathematics. Surveys and drawings were collected from 791 young adolescents in order to understand their values, ideals, and school experiences. The participants were 380 Icelanders (mean age = 13.9) and 411 Singaporeans (mean age = 13.2). Icelandic youth expressed desires for positive interpersonal relationships, learning, enjoyment, and individuality and Singaporean youth valued positive interpersonal relationships, hard work, seriousness, and family harmony. The final section of the paper suggests implications for the USA. (Contains 8 figures and 3 tables.) [This research was supported in part by a Messing Award, a Beatrice and David Kornblum Institute for Teaching Excellence grant, and Center for International Education grant.]

This paper compares the early life, background, and education of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. It makes the case that an adaptation of the curve developed by C. Quigley can be used to trace the motivations of both Piaget and Vygotsky in creating their respective theories. The analysis also reveals the adversity that each man faced. Although they lived in countries with very different governments and histories, the political and military aspects of their nations had an impact on both men as they created their pedagogies. Both were influenced by prevailing science attitudes. Had they not lived in countries with flexible science attitudes, neither would have been a pedagogue. Piaget would have been a natural scientist; Vygotsky, a teacher. Flexibility at the university level led each to see that psychology required further investigation. The social factor had the greatest influence on both men. Without the influence of their hometowns, parents, siblings, friends, mentors, and teachers, neither would have created a pedagogy. Early in their lives, both men rejected organized religion in favor of philosophy, but neither rejected the heart of his faith. In the final analysis, however, it was education that gave each the means by which he could relieve inner psychological tensions through the development of his theories. To overcome angst, they had to expand their intellects. (Contains 192 references.) (SLD)

This paper focuses on similarities in the lives of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky to enlighten study of their pedagogies and to provide some information for current classroom techniques. Neither man had a great deal to say about his early life, although Piaget published an autobiography. A number of primary sources were used to construct the timeline that shows similarities in the lives of these two theorists. The environments in which they grew up and lived impelled them to bring to their research efforts a personal background that gave birth to their research and influenced its scope and perspective. The timeline traces the course of both men's lives from birth to death, marking the publication of many of their pedagogical works. (Contains 15 references.) (SLD)

The impact of significant family life events on child educational outcomes was examined for a sample of 204 families in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, whose children began kindergarten in 1992, 1993, or 1994. These children and families were part of the Head Start Transition Demonstration Project, a longitudinal study to assess benefits of services like those provided by Head Start to families and children during the first few years of public school. Families were interviewed, during which parent questionnaires--styled similarly to Sarason et al (1978) Life Event Scale--were completed. The most frequently occurring events were change in employment, death in the close family, gaining a new family member, and separation of the responding parent and her/his partner. Preliminary results included a significant negative relationship between the total number of life events a child experiences and his or her achievement scores. Children who experience more major life events achieve less in school. (Contains 10 references.) (BGC)

The Tell-Me-A-Story Apperceptive Test (TEMAS) is an individual apperceptive test, similar to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) of personality assessment. The TEMAS is intended for use with children and adolescents ages 5-18 years old, and is marketed as a personality assessment tool for minority, primarily Hispanic and African-American, and non-minority girls and boys. This paper contains a "Practical Evaluation" section, which: (1) describes the physical composition of a TEMAS; (2) discusses possible confounding factors intrinsic to the administration and interpretation of the TEMAS; and (3) describes how TEMAS stories are scored. The paper's "Technical Evaluation" section examines a sample of 642 children and discusses TEMAS' internal consistency, test-retest reliability, interrater reliability, content validity, construct validity, criterion validity, and concurrent validity as obtained from the data collected. The conclusion is drawn that the TEMAS is an excellent attempt at balancing out the disparity in multi-cultural assessment, while its primary value currently seems to be as a clinical instrument. Further studies of the African-American population's experiences with this instrument need to be conducted, and work needs to be done in general to ascertain whether the TEMAS will be suitable for suburban minority youth. (TS)

This paper examines how the concept of the "whole" child changed from 1890 to 1940 and how those changes affected approaches to early childhood education during that time. The literature survey is based on the content of the published proceedings of the Kindergarten Department of the National Educational Association. Examination of the literature found the following six dimensions of the whole child identified: the spiritual, aesthetic, physical, mental, social, and emotional dimensions. In the decade before 1900, several views of the child coexisted. The Froebelian notion of the child as spiritual, spontaneous, and innately good was reexamined in the light of science, and the new child psychology introduced the concept of a child with animal instincts, impulses, and habits. The objective, scientific study of children suggested that the child was neither good nor bad, and that the child's development was dependent upon nature and the environment. The goal of kindergarten was to supplement the nurture of the home and establish good habits, shape good citizens, and provide moral instruction. In 1923, criticism of behaviorism appeared, leading to the view that the inner life of the child was to be liberated to allow the child to reach his or her potential. The child had needs that had to be met, and the goal of education was to contribute to the growth of the well-rounded child's personality. The scientific study of children continues today, and while such study may encourage distance from children and condescension, it can also produce new respect for them. (Contains 46 references.) (TM)

For adults, fear of death is universal, but young children are exposed to realities of death only infrequently and are often shielded from it by parents. Because parents realize the extent of a child's fear of losing a parent, parents sometimes take precautionary steps, such as avoiding both parents' travelling on the same airplane or designating someone to care for a surviving child. For young children, the greatest source of stress is loss of a parent. Short-term effects of parental death vary, and are readily observed and appropriately addressed. Long-term effects are complex and difficult to ascertain. Some researchers believe loss of a parent should be regarded as a potential developmental problem, but research is contradictory and inconclusive. In general, children who are surrounded by alternative sources of emotional support and understanding tend to adjust well. However, some situations, when interacting with other variables, may exacerbate the grieving process. Finally, children can be taught in a developmentally appropriate way about death and learn that fears about parental loss are normal. (Contains 16 references.) (TM)

The International Resilience Project was intended to determine the multidimensional, reciprocal, and dynamic factors--and relationships of factors--that parents, teachers, caregivers, and children themselves use to promote resilience in children. The samples were 589 children and their caregivers from 14 countries: Lithuania, Russia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, Hungary, Taiwan, Namibia, Sudan, Canada, South Africa, and Japan. The ages of the children coincided with the first two of Erikson's developmental stages. Fifteen situations were developed, and adults and children's responses were measured. The major findings include the following: (1) resilience-promoting behavior is consistent with the familiarity of a situation; (2) younger children have a lower frequency of resilience-promoting responses than do older children or adults; (3) reports of a personal experience correlated with a higher percentage of resilience responses; and (4) more than half the responses showed no or only partial use of resilience factors. (Checklists for children's perceptions of resilience are included, and demographic data from 14 countries are appended.) (WP)

One dynamic that is often neglected in treatment of child sexual abuse is that of how a child's premature indoctrination into sexualized behavior, and the behaviors themselves, may inadvertently contribute to the overall victimization process. Children are capable of experiencing physical and psychological pleasure from sexual stimulation and are entitled to safeguards and freedoms from which to explore these developmental behaviors. However, they can also be vulnerable to inappropriate manipulations and attentions. Children can recognize the various benefits and rewards from compliant sexual participation. They may even initiate sexual behaviors such as flirtation, which have been modeled or reinforced. Therefore, it is highly possible that sexually abused children have been inappropriately and prematurely indoctrinated to respond to their environments and significant others in a developmentally sexualized manner. If children are not injured or frightened, they may engage in a progression of sexualized behaviors and may even manipulate sexualized activities for perceived gain. The perpetrator may see this as evidence that the child is sexually provocative and willing to participate. Many victims of sexual abuse blame themselves for the experience. Counselors need to help these victims understand normal sexual feelings and sexuality development in children and how such childhood responses were natural given their situations. They also need to know that while children may exhibit or engage in sexually provocative behaviors in an attempt to garner attention and/or affection, they are developmentally unprepared to associate such behaviors with true "consent' as defined by adults. Contains 19 references. (JE)

This study explores the construct validity of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), which was created as a standardized tool for recording the behaviors of children aged 4 through 16 as reported by their parents or caretakers. Since its inception in 1983, the CBCL has been applied and tested on numerous clinical samples, yielding an impressive body of quantitative support. Due to the liberal application of the CBCL in child mental health settings, however, it is critical that the validity of the instrument be supported for specific child sub-populations. In this study, the factor structure of the CBCL is explored for different sex and age variations in a sample of 2,628 children presented for treatment at a mental health center in a midwestern city. Results suggest that the subscales of aggression and depression are invariant across sub-samples of the population. No single source of data is sufficient in diagnostic assessment of individual children or adolescents, however. For this and other reasons, cautious use and interpretation of the CBCL is recommended. It is also recommended that the CBCL be used as auxiliary data, employed in conjunction with other data. Includes 10 tables. (KW)

An interview on peace education with Petra Hesse, of the Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts), is presented. The Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age was founded out of a concern about children's fears of the future and the risks of nuclear war. Petra Hesse coordinates a research project on children's and adolescents' images of the enemy and is interested in an integration of education for media literacy for multicultural awareness and for creative conflict resolution. (Author)

Prevailing research argues that childhood misbehavior in the classroom is bad for schooling and, presumably, bad for labor market outcomes. In contrast, we argue that some childhood misbehavior represents underlying socio-emotional skills that are valuable in the labor market. We follow work from psychology and categorize observed classroom misbehavior into two underlying latent factors. We then estimate a model of educational attainment and earnings outcomes, allowing the impact of each of the two factors to vary by outcome. We find that one of the factors, labeled in the psychological literature as externalizing behavior (and linked, for example, to aggression), reduces educational attainment yet increases earnings. Unlike most models where socio-emotional skills that increase human capital through education also increase labor market skills, our findings illustrate how some socio-emotional skills can be productive in some economic contexts and counter-productive in others. Policies designed to promote human capital accumulation could therefore have mixed effects or even negative economic consequences, especially in the case of policies that target socio-emotional skill formation for children or adolescents which are aimed solely at improving educational outcomes.