Fairness is central to morality. Previous research has shown that children begin to understand fairness between the ages of four and six, depending on the context and method used. Within distributive contexts, there is little clear evidence that children have a concept of fairness before the age of five. This research, however, has mostly examined children's explicit verbal responses to questions about unequal distributions-a method that often underestimates children's knowledge. In the current study, we instead examined emotional and behavioral signs that children notice and dislike inequality. We distributed an unequal number of rewards (stickers) among pairs of children (the ages of three to five years) and probed their responses to the inequality.Both implicit and explicit measures revealed that children as young as three years old notice and react negatively to an unfair distribution, particularly when they receive less than their partner. The few age trends that were found involved verbal (explicit) responses, providing evidence that although children do not explicitly talk about fairness until the age of five or six, this talk is an effort to explain emotional reactions that emerged earlier in development.

In recent years, parents in the United States and worldwide have purchased enormous numbers of videos and DVDs designed and marketed for infants, many assuming that their children would benefit from watching them. We examined how many new words 12- to 18-month-old children learned from viewing a popular DVD several times a week for 4 weeks at home. The most important result was that children who viewed the DVD did not learn any more words from their monthlong exposure to it than did a control group. The highest level of learning occurred in a no-video condition in which parents tried to teach their children the same target words during everyday activities. Another important result was that parents who liked the DVD tended to overestimate how much their children had learned from it. We conclude that infants learn relatively little from infant media and that their parents sometimes overestimate what they do learn.

Picture books are ubiquitous in young children's lives and are assumed to support children's acquisition of information about the world. Given their importance, relatively little research has directly examined children's learning from picture books. We report two studies examining children's acquisition of labels and facts from picture books that vary on two dimensions: iconicity of the pictures and presence of manipulative features (or "pop-ups"). In Study 1, 20-month-old children generalized novel labels less well when taught from a book with manipulative features than from standard picture books without such elements. In Study 2, 30-and 36-month-old children learned fewer facts when taught from a manipulative picture book with drawings than from a standard picture book with realistic images and no manipulative features. The results of the two studies indicate that children's learning from picture books is facilitated by realistic illustrations, but impeded by manipulative features.

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One of the most common types of interaction between parents and their very young children is picture-book reading, with alphabet books being one of the most popular types of book used in these interactions. Here we report two studies examining alphabet letter learning by 30- to 36-month-old children in book-reading interactions with an adult. Each child encountered either a standard type of children’s book or a book with manipulative features – flaps, levers, textures and other elements designed to elicit physical manipulation. In the first study, the children learned more letters with the relatively plain books than with a book with manipulative features. The manipulative elements apparently distracted them from the information in that book. In the second study, a manipulative feature that was specifically designed to attract children’s attention to the letters did not facilitate performance. These results are consistent with the theoretical concept of dual representation and they have important practical implications for the design and selection of educationally oriented books for very young children.

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The purpose of this study was to examine six early numeracy measures used to monitor the mathematics progress of kindergarten and first-grade students. Seventy-one kindergarten students and 75 first-grade students were administered the measures each week. Delayed-alternate form reliability was adequate for instructional decision making on some measures, and low reliability was reported for quantity discrimination, as well as for the next number and number facts measures. Concurrent criterion validity coefficients comparing the measures with student performance on the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement–Third Edition (WJ III) resulted in weaker coefficients as compared to previous studies that have compared similar measures with the WJ III. Hierarchical linear modeling was used at each grade level to ascertain the ability of the six measures to model weekly growth trajectories over 13 weeks. All measures produced growth rates that were significant across time, for both kindergarten and first grade, with linear growth observed for all measures.

In the last decade, exposure to screen media has extended to ever earlier ages, as video products designed and marketed specifically for infants have proliferated and generated extraordinary sales. Parents purchase these products for multiple reasons, including the expectation that their infants will learn from them. We first summarize some of the data documenting this new phenomenon and then raise the question of what empirical research using video presentations tells us about the likelihood that infants will be able to learn from video. Although there has been remarkably few studies directly examining the extent to which infants learn from video displays, there is a substantial body of research in which video has been used to present various kinds of stimuli to infants and toddlers. We examine some of these studies with respect to what they can tell us about the potential visual media have to support learning early in life.