Doris Bergen

When we advocate for quality in early childhood care and education settings, we must remember that quality itself is culturally and contextually bound, and can look very different in different countries, communities, and cultures. While in one culture, quality may mean that children participate in food preparation as part of the center community, that type of participation may not be appropriate or valued in another culture. With the development of the Global Guidelines Assessment (GGA) in 1999, its authors created a globally applicable measurement tool for quality in early childhood care and education programs that left room for the cultural and contextual differences inherent in any assessment of quality. One important element of the GGA is its inclusion of internal stakeholders. This idea of inclusion—both of diverse students and of parents and community members—is critical to ensuring quality care and education for all young children.

Infant-parent play with toys is an early form of social communication, and the toy features (i.e., affordances), as well as the child's language competence, contribute to the developmental level of the play and the types of play actions that occur. This research, conducted in cooperation with a toy manufacturer, investigated how the affordances of a technology-enhanced toy were used by 26 infant-parent pairs during six clinical sessions of play with the toy. The types of play, the features of the toy that elicited play, the humor elicited by the toy, and the communicative interactions of the parent and child were observed. Results indicated that certain affordances of the toy were used in exploration, practice play, and social games and were related to episodes of child laughter. The communicative interactions of the parents and the language patterns used in the sessions grew in complexity as the children's language facility increased. The affordances of the toy played a role in a variety of parent-child interactions and joint attention experiences.

This study explored gifted children's humor media preferences, explanations of humor funniness, evaluation of their sense of humor, and ability to produce, understand, and figure out riddle “punch lines.” Seventy-four gifted-identified children (40 male; 34 female) ages 7–12 were interviewed. Most media humor exhibited conceptual incongruity or word play with multiple meanings. Children rated themselves high on sense of humor (% = 3.9 of 5). Younger and older children and boys and girls differed only on girls' rating themselves more likely to notice and laugh at funny situations (the spectator role!), F(1, 72) = 6.319, p < .01, and younger children's rating themselves as more often in a bad mood, F(1, 72) = 5.541, p < .05. Most children produced a correctly told joke or riddle and gave accurate explanations of funniness. Boys' funny media examples had more hostile qualities (TV, (χ