The preschool child: Recent research and its implications for early childhood practice and policy

Abstract

In a progressive society the education and care of young children should be guided by the best available knowledge. As advancing research forces us to reexamine our understanding of early development, we should reexamine early childhood practices and policies as well. This conviction provided the motivation for this special issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology and for the conference at The Pennsylvania State University where the articles in this collection were originally presented. All these articles, in various ways, address the challenge of putting early childhood research into practice. This is an especially important time to reconsider the potential applications of early childhood research. Enrollment in early childhood programs has increased dramatically in recent years, leading to increased concern with how to make these programs as beneficial as possible for children. During this same period research on preschool children has also increased dramatically. A constant stream of new findings has led to profound changes in our view of early development, yet the implications of these changes for early childhood practice and policy remain largely unexplored. One consequence of recent research is an increased appreciation for the complexity of development during the preschool years. The theoretical framework that previously dominated early childhood research and practice was quite straightforward in some ways, emphasizing as it did the homogeneous nature of preoperational thinking and the general deficiencies (animism, realism, egocentrism, precausal reasoning) that made preschool children qualitatively different from older children and adults. In contrast to this traditional view, recent research paints a more heterogeneous picture of development during the preschool years, one in which young children are recognized as having a complex mixture of impressive abilities and glaring limitations (e.g., Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993). Although this new view of early development may be more accurate than the one it replaces, its implications for early childhood practice remain to be worked out. Some of these implications are explored in the following articles in which researchers who study early development in several domains discuss their recent work and its potential applications. Research that provides a more accurate account of the basic abilities of young