ABSTRACT
The scientific truths of the twentieth century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is much greater. If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth. Science’s embrace of early childhood education has intensified and broadened in the twentieth and twenty-first century, from the Child Study movement that created norms in child development to the prodigious research analyses of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. The topic of early childhood education has captured the attention of researchers from a variety of disciplines. Their tools and disciplinarily informed perspectives have created new knowledge of different facets of the field, they have pulled early education on the national stage, and they have multiplied the sheer number of journal articles with early childhood education in the title.
