卷首语(英文)

Sound the flute!Now it‘s mute!Birds delight,Day and night,Nightingale,Inthe dale,Lark in sky,Merrily,Merrily,merrily to welcome in the year.Little lamb,Here I am;Come and lick My white neck;Letme pull Your soft wool;Let me kiss Your soft face;Merrily,merrily we welcome in the year.Little boy,Full of joy;Little girl,Sweet and small;Cock does crow,So do you;Merry voice,Inrant noise;Merrily,merrily to welcome in the year.卷首语(英文)@Robert Louis Stevenson     

School readiness gains made by ethnically diverse children in poverty attending center-based childcare and public school pre-kindergarten programs

Although intensive early childhood interventions and high quality preschool programs have been shown to foster children's school readiness, little is known about the school readiness gains made by ethnically and linguistically diverse children in poverty receiving subsidies to attend center-based childcare or those in public school pre-kindergarten programs. Within the context of a large-scale, university–community applied research and evaluation project, The Miami School Readiness Project, children receiving subsidies to attend center-based childcare (n = 1478), children attending free Title 1 public school pre-k programs (n = 1611), and children attending fee-supported public school pre-k programs (n = 749) were individually assessed at the beginning and end of their pre-kindergarten year in the areas of cognitive, language, and fine motor development. Parents and teachers reported on children's socio-emotional strengths and behavior concerns. Findings revealed that although children from all types of programs made considerable school readiness gains in most areas in terms of their national relative standing, children attending public school pre-k programs typically made somewhat greater gains in the areas of cognitive and language development. Results suggest that center-based childcare programs in the community may be beneficial for fostering school readiness within ethnically diverse children in poverty, and that public school pre-kindergarten programs may show even greater gains in some areas. Policy implications are discussed.     

Executive functioning and preschoolers' understanding of false beliefs, false photographs, and false signs

Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers' emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 ( N =44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted performance on false belief tasks, but not on false photograph tasks. Study 2 ( N =54) replicated the finding from Study 1 and showed that performance on the executive functioning task also predicted 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on false sign tasks. These findings show that executive functioning is required to reason only about representations that are intended to reflect a true state of affairs. Results are discussed with respect to theories of preschoolers' theory-of-mind development.     

The effect of facilitative communication training on teacher response quality

Training designed to enhance facilitative communication between teachers and students is becoming an increasingly important element of teacher training programs. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effect of facilitative communication training on the quality of teacher response to various student problems and to the accompanying emotional states of anger, joy, or depression. The subjects consisted of 64 undergraduate teacher education majors who responded in writing to 15 audiotaped stimulus vignettes. A 5×3×2 repeated measures analysis of variance was used to measure the effects of problem situation, emotional state, and training on empathic understanding. The results indicated significant differences between trained and untrained groups, as well as differences in quality of response due to emotion, with joy eliciting greater empathy than depression or anger. Significant interactions among the variables also were obtained. Implications are discussed in terms of human relations training for teachers.     

Developmental patterns of children's shyness: Relations with physiological,emotional, and regulatory responses to being treated unfairly

The dysregulation of social fear has been widely studied in children's shyness, but we know little about how shy children regulate during unfair treatment. We first characterized developmental patterns of children's shyness (N = 304, n_girls = 153; 74% White, 26% Other) across 2 (M_age = 2.07), 3 (M_age = 3.08), 4 (M_age = 4.08), and 6 (M_age = 6.58) years of age. Data collection occurred from 2007 to 2014. At age 6, the high stable group had higher cardiac vagal withdrawal and lower expressed sadness and approach-related regulatory strategy than the low stable group when being treated unfairly. Although shy children may be more physiologically impacted by being treated unfairly, they may mask their sadness to signal appeasement.