Action In Young Children Research Articles

Civic action and play: examples from Maori, Aboriginal Australian and Latino communities

ABSTRACTUsing data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand, Australia and the US, we consider some of the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and collectively pursue ideas and things that are important to the group. We use an example from each country and apply the work of Rancière and Arendt to think about collectivity as civic action in young children’s schooling lives. Play, rather than an act itself, is positioned here as political time and space that make such civic action possible in the everyday lives of children. We argue here that play is the most common (and endangered) time and space in which children act for the collective.

Helping Behavior and Joint Action in Young Children

An important idea due to Tomasello and others is that the human capacity as the human capacity for social cooperation is at the heart of the species’ capacity to understand others’ mental states and behavior. Furthermore, they argue that this idea allows for an explanation of how humans came to share thoughts and language. While this is a promising idea, the special attempt to pursue this hypothesis in developmental studies and evolutionary theory developed by Tomasello and his research group faces several problems. This is especially apparent in their attempts to explain helping behavior and joint action in young children. In this paper, we argue that many of these problems result from assuming that the right explanation of joint action and simple forms of shared intentionality is given by Bratman’s theory of shared intentions.

From the Editors

Dear Colleagues, The transition of the International Reading Association to the International Literacy Association has been the result of an evolution of ideas and understandings about how we define the field. For some, the adoption of literacy in the association's name was merely the formalization of a de facto identity already held by many. Reading has not been replaced, but rather subsumed by a broader and more comprehensive descriptor, one that better captures the nature of the research happening in the field in the 21st century. With reverence to the past, we have ventured into our next era, meshing old with new and borrowing from knowledge generated from a variety of disciplines. The five peer-reviewed articles featured in this issue of Reading Research Quarterly could be viewed similarly, presenting cutting-edge research that builds on the past, examines new approaches, and has implications for practice and additional research that might transfer across populations. McGee and her colleagues bridge old and new in their investigation of young children's actions and strategic use of sources of information at a point of difficulty in reading. In the study, students’ actions at point of difficulty for Reading Recovery students reading at grade level at the end of the year are compared with those of Reading Recovery students who were not yet on grade level. The researchers found that all readers increased their use of graphic information, using it both alone and in conjunction with contextual information, and decreased their use of contextual information alone. More importantly, the researchers identified two new categories of error episodes: single action and action chain. Students who were at grade level in reading at the end of the year increased their use of action chains, whereas students below grade level did not. Tighe and Schatschneider make a new and considerable contribution to the research on morphological awareness and the interplay between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Their investigation is particularly compelling because it ventures into new territory on several fronts. Never before has the factor structure of morphological awareness in Adult Basic Education (ABE) students been explored, nor have ABE students ever been the subjects of research differentiating morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Results from the study, generated through confirmatory factor analyses, support a multidimensional view of morphological awareness and provide the basis for a preliminary framework for understanding the construct and its interaction with vocabulary knowledge. Do emergent bilingual children borrow syntactic skills from their native language to understand a new one? In a fascinating study of Chinese–English learners in grades 1–3, Siu and Ho consider the import and impact of syntactic skills in three applications. A rigorous research design and analysis of the data yielded significant findings related to syntactical knowledge, many of which have cross-cultural implications for literacy instruction. In one particularly interesting component of the study, Siu and Ho examine cross-language transfer to determine whether syntactic knowledge in one language supports comprehension in another—putting to the test Cummins's hypothesis asserting that underlying abilities in literacy transfer across languages. Academic vocabulary has long been an area of interest for literacy researchers. Ucceli and her colleagues move the research in a new direction, beyond this single content-specific concept, to consider the impact of the more comprehensive construct of academic language. Conceptualized as CALS (core academic-language skills), this new expanded construct encompasses a battery of connected skills thought to support reading comprehension across content areas. Children in grades 4–6 were given the CALS-I, a robust and innovative instrument. Researchers looked for variability in students’ CALS-I scores by grade, socioeconomic status, and English proficiency. Scores on assessments of academic vocabulary and word-reading fluency, along with social and demographic factors, served as covariates. This research yielded significant results relevant to the field and future studies, including the finding that CALS are independent predictors of reading comprehension even when controlling for academic vocabulary, fluency, and sociodemographic factors. “So, you can write me a beautiful two-page paper, but I'm only grading the first 26 lines,” said a teacher attempting to teach her students to adhere to the 26-line maximum that they would encounter in their state's new mandated assessment. Comments such as these are considered in Davis and Willson's insightful and thought-provoking case study examining test-centric literacy practices during a testing transition in the State of Texas. Davis and Willson provide observations and commentary from the teachers, who have been “conscripted into participation in a complex data economy.” Scrupulous coding procedures and practices led the authors to suggest that transfer avoidance, managerial partitioning, and overreaching inferences are largely responsible for the persistence of test-centric practices. Smith, A.B., & Jones, X.Y. (2015). Article title. Journal Name. Advance online publication. doi:123456789 Linda B. Gambrell Susan B. Neuman

Joint attention as action

We demonstrate that “joint attention”, usually conceived of in the psychological sciences as indicative of such minded processes as the capacity for understanding the intentional, goal-directed behavior of others, is fundamentally an interactional process, one that cannot be extricated from the ongoing flow of social activity. We examine very young children's actions of showing objects to others, and explicate the practical procedures by which they draw and sustain another's attention to an object, and convey “what for”—that is, what another should do in response. At issue is how children in a natural social setting (here, a daycare center) track the activities of others for felicitous moments to present objects, and design and position their actions by reference to the ongoing preoccupations, commitments, and distractions of others. Further, drawing another's attention poses sequential implications for children's actions which structure opportunities for parties (child and other) to display, and modify, their understandings of what sort of social exchange is transpiring between them.

Let’s Pretend!

According to many, joint intentional action must be understood in terms of joint intentions. Most accounts of joint intention appeal to a set of sophisticated individual intentional states. The author argues that standard accounts of joint intention exclude the possibility of joint action in young children because they presuppose that the participants have a robust theory of mind, something young children lack. But young children do engage in joint action. The author offers a revision of Michael Bratman’s analysis of joint intention that reflects the socio-cognitive abilities young children do have. This revision makes sense of joint action among young children and equally well explains simple joint actions involving adults.

A Longitudinal Study of Gendered Vocabulary and Communicative Action in Young Children.

Development of children's vocabularies for gender-typed words and communicative actions was investigated longitudinally from 13 to 36 months and in a group of 9.5-month-olds. Vocabularies of gendered words were assessed using lists of adult-rated gender-typed words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; L. Fenson et al., 1994). At 24 to 36 months, girls' and boys' productive vocabularies contained more same-gender-typed words than other-gender-typed words. Receptive vocabulary gender-differential effects were apparent among boys at 18 months. At 13 and 18 months, gender-typed differences were apparent in communicative actions. The research reveals the utility of unobtrusive, nonexperimental measures for assessing gender-related knowledge and behavior in young children.

Towards a reconceptualization of written language development

Researchers interested in written language development have tended to explore a single “layer” of written language growth, for example, the structural complexity of children's textual worlds or the orthographic sophistication of their first encoded words. But young children's actions suggest that these multiple layers are actually multiple dimensions of their symbolic acts: Textual words and worlds are dynamically linked with each other. More broadly, researchers and educators often conceive of written language as an extension of oral language development. But young children's participation in “literacy” events illustrates the complex links between written language growth and the development of children's entire symbolic repertoires and changing social relationships. Thus, through a critical consideration of existent research and an interpretive analysis of a child's early school experiences, this article aims to contribute to an authentic, more childlike vision of literacy growth. This vision preserves the links between the multiple dimensions of literate activity and the multiple symbolic tools of young children. Moreover, this article argues that such a vision yields new ways of thinking about, and potentially taking advantage of, the diverse symbolic resources of children in our schools.

Moral reasoning and action in young children

Moral reasoning and action in young children