http://www.parliament.uk/post/pn140.pdf
This report was prepared for a House of Commons Education and Employment Select Committee inquiry into Early Years Education. It summarises scientific research on both brain development and children’s psychological development; also studies that have compared the outcomes of different types of pre-school education. It then discusses the implications of this research for early years education policy. There’s a lot of information contained in this report but it is easy to read and to grasp.
http://cogprints.org/view/subjects/dev-psy.html
A list of academic papers on developmental psychology available from CogPrints. Clicking on the links in the papers will take you to full text copies of these articles.
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/id/research_age.html
Research into Ageing and Cognition at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, at Southampton University, with many links to full text articles of their published research.