Actual Child Research Articles

ELEMENTOS CONSTITUTIVOS DA EXPERIÊNCIA INFANTIL

O artigo apresenta os elementos que compõem as experiências produzidas pelas crianças no ambiente da Educação Infantil. A categoria experiência foi refinada a partir da crítica da cultura e da modernidade de Walter Benjamin e dos Estudos Sociais da Infância. O estudo de caráter qualitativo buscou captar a densidade das ações das crianças. Identificou-se que as experiências das crianças são resultantes da combinatória de ações que elas desenvolvem nas relações que estabelecem com os artefatos, nas relações vivenciadas entre elas e os adultos e por último nas relações entre as próprias crianças. Ao vivenciar as experiências no âmbito da instituição, as crianças articulam-nas a situações vividas em temporalidades distintas das dos adultos, criando, assim, campos de experiências.

Young children in day and night care: negotiating and constructing belonging during daily arrivals

ABSTRACTThe paper aims at understanding the processes related to young children's belonging during daily arrivals at day and night care. Two aspects of a child's belonging are considered: membership and sense of belonging. Data were gathered by ethnographic observation of 8 children aged from 20 to 36 months in two Finnish day care centres offering day and night care. Arrival episodes taking place at different times of day were analysed qualitatively based on the children's actions and expressions. During these episodes, the children negotiated and constructed their belonging by interacting with adults, peers and material objects. These interactions took place within varying social and material surroundings and according to different daily routines that sometimes challenged the child's belonging. The results underline the importance of sensitive responsiveness by educators to young children's initiatives in supporting children's belonging during daily arrivals at day and night care.

An examination of parents’ and preschool workers’ perspectives on bullying in preschool

ABSTRACTParents (n = 141) and preschool workers (n = 81) completed a survey regarding their perspectives towards: (a) the existence of bullying in preschool, (b) interpretations of bullying, (c) the roles of bullies and victims, and (d) gender differences. Findings suggest that both groups largely believe that bullying occurs in preschool. Excluding others from play, conditional threats, and the victim's perception of being bullied were the three conditions most likely to be associated with bullying. Parents were significantly more likely than workers to hold a negative view of bullies and believe that bullying differs with regard to gender. Whereas most participants felt that bullying could occur in a single incident, only one in four agreed with the notion that children's actions must be intentional to be considered bullying. The study raises questions about whether current interpretations of bullying in the literature are suitable for children in the context of preschool.

Finding Children Without Toys: The Archaeology of Children at Shabbona Grove, Illinois

The idea that children's activities may be seen through traditionally adult material culture is rarely explored in archaeological analyses. This paper advocates a more nuanced interpretation of assemblages in archaeological datasets that highlights children and their activities. Discussions of children in the archaeological record are often restricted to material culture attributed specifically to them, such as toys and clothing. Archaeological research conducted in Shabbona Grove, rural Illinois, USA, revealed a concentration of non-child-specific artefacts, the context of which suggests the deliberate collection or curation by children in the latter part of the twentieth century. The concentration was diverse and included artefacts of ceramics, glassware, machinery metal and clothing. The Shabbona Grove study illustrates the potential of identifying children's actions without child-specific material culture. At this site, child-specific material culture recovered in excavation may be less informative about the actions and lives of children compared to other child-utilised items. The oppressive poverty at Shabbona Grove suggests an interpretation of the suspected children's collection as a form of coping mechanism or expression.

Parental responsibility beliefs: associations with parental anxiety and behaviours in the context of childhood anxiety disorders

BackgroundHigh levels of parental anxiety are associated with poor treatment outcomes for children with anxiety disorders. Associated parental cognitions and behaviours have been implicated as impediments to successful treatment. We examined the association between parental responsibility beliefs, maternal anxiety and parenting behaviours in the context of childhood anxiety disorders. MethodsAnxious and non-anxious mothers of 7–12 year old children with a current anxiety disorder reported their parental responsibility beliefs using a questionnaire measure. Parental behaviours towards their child during a stressor task were measured. ResultsParents with a current anxiety disorder reported a greater sense of responsibility for their child's actions and wellbeing than parents who scored within the normal range for anxiety. Furthermore, higher parental responsibility was associated with more intrusive and less warm behaviours in parent–child interactions and there was an indirect effect between maternal anxiety and maternal intrusive behaviours via parental responsibility beliefs. LimitationsThe sample was limited to a treatment-seeking, relatively high socio-economic population and only mothers were included so replication with more diverse groups is needed. The use of a range of stressor tasks may have allowed for a more comprehensive assessment of parental behaviours. ConclusionsThe findings suggest that parental anxiety disorder is associated with an elevated sense of parental responsibility and may promote parental behaviours likely to inhibit optimum child treatment outcomes. Parental responsibility beliefs may therefore be important to target in child anxiety treatments in the context of parental anxiety disorders.

“She Don't Know I Got It. You Ain't Gonna Tell Her, Are You?” Popular Culture as Resistance in American Preschools

Popular culture is often a site of contestation in preschool classrooms. A multisited ethnographic design revealed preschools employed varied strategies to limit popular culture. Teacher and children's actions were considered through Michel de Certeau's (1984) concepts of tactics and strategies. Interviews and observations revealed children were well aware of rules limiting popular culture and agentively engaged in tactical resistance in order to insert their voices into the preschool curriculum.

Combating weight-based bullying in schools: is there public support for the use of litigation?

Bullying litigation is an emerging area of law that has increased in response to serious cases of bullying at school. Weight-based bullying is prevalent at school, but no research has examined the use of litigation to address this problem. We assessed public support for litigation approaches to address weight-based bullying at school, and whether support for litigation varies according to the reason why a student is bullied. A national sample of 994 adults (49% parents) completed an online questionnaire assessing their support for litigation approaches in response to hypothetical incidents of youth bullying. As many as two thirds of participants supported litigation against schools for failing to intervene and protect students from weight-based bullying. Litigation remedies received slightly higher support in response to bullying due to race or sexual orientation compared to body weight. Participants favored litigation approaches that target schools for inadequate intervention or a bully's parents on behalf of their child's actions. Our study offers novel findings about public and parental views of litigation as a potential approach to address weight-based (and other forms of) bullying, and introduces considerations about the potential role of litigation as part of broader remedies to address youth bullying.

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

EEG imaging of toddlers during dyadic turn-taking: Mu-rhythm modulation while producing or observing social actions

Contemporary active-EEG and EEG-imaging methods show particular promise for studying the development of action planning and social-action representation in infancy and early childhood. Action-related mu suppression was measured in eleven 3-year-old children and their mothers during a ‘live,’ largely unscripted social interaction. High-density EEG was recorded from children and synchronized with motion-captured records of children's and mothers' hand actions, and with video recordings. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) was used to separate brain and non-brain source signals in toddlers' EEG records. EEG source dynamics were compared across three kinds of epochs: toddlers' own actions (execution), mothers' actions (observation), and between-turn intervals (no action). Mu (6–9Hz) power was suppressed in left and right somatomotor cortex during both action execution and observation, as reflected by independent components of individual children's EEG data. These mu rhythm components were accompanied by beta-harmonic (~16Hz) suppression, similar to findings from adults. The toddlers' power spectrum and scalp density projections provide converging evidence of adult-like mu-suppression features. Mu-suppression components' source locations were modeled using an age-specific 4-layer forward head model. Putative sources clustered around somatosensory cortex, near the hand/arm region. The results demonstrate that action-locked, event-related EEG dynamics can be measured, and source-resolved, from toddlers during social interactions with relatively unrestricted social behaviors.

Christ Child: cultural memories of a young Jesus

Little is known about the early childhood of Jesus Christ. But in the decades after his death, stories began circulating about his origins. One collection of such tales was the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, known in antiquity as the Paidika or Childhood Deeds of Jesus. In it, Jesus not only performs miracles while at play (such as turning clay birds into live sparrows) but also gets enmeshed in a series of interpersonal conflicts and curses to death children and teachers who rub him the wrong way. How would early readers have made sense of this young Jesus? In this highly innovative book, Stephen Davis draws on current theories about how human communities construe the past to answer this question. He explores how ancient readers would have used texts, images, places, and other key reference points from their own social world to understand the Christ child's curious actions. He then shows how the figure of a young Jesus was later picked up and exploited in the context of medieval Jewish-Christian and Christian-Muslim encounters. Challenging many scholarly assumptions, Davis adds a crucial dimension to the story of how Christian history was created.

Professional Noticing: Developing Responsive Mathematics Teaching

Learn how to coordinate the use of CCSSM with this emerging framework to attend to children's actions, make interpretations, and respond with robust instruction.

L’agressivité excessive chez les jeunes enfants : troubles cliniques, tempérament et interactions maternelles

BackgroundDisruptive behavior problems in young children are of major concern in the field of child mental health. They are liable to disturb family and social life through severe interactive dysfunctions. These young children show a large array of behavioral, cognitive and emotional symptoms, and it seems important to specify clinical disorders. Prior research has showed several temperament characteristics in young children with externalizing problems. However, parenting may increase or reduce these characteristics, especially in case of difficult temperament. ObjectiveThe current research has explored these issues, aiming at contributing to a better understanding of these disorders and to putting forward directions for well-adapted therapeutic interventions. MethodThe study involved a clinical population of 30 referred children (mean age=3 years and 5 months), and their mother. Children were referred because they showed excessive aggressiveness in both family and social contexts. Children diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorders (DSM-IV-TR) as well as low weight/premature children were not included in the sample. Children's assessments include: clinical disorders (DC: 0-3R, 2005), developmental level (Brunet-Lézine, 1995), child temperament (Children Behavior Questionnaire, Rothbart, et al., 2001). The quality of mother–child interaction was assessed during a videotaped free play sequence, with the Rating Scale of Interaction Style (Clark and Seifer, 1983, adapted by Molitor and Mayes, 2010). ResultsTwo thirds of the referred children show a regulation disorder of sensory processing, sensory stimulation-seeking/impulsive type. The fifth of the children show disorders of affect and the remaining children were diagnosed with diverse clinical disorders. Children with a regulation disorder showed concomitant sleep behavior disorders, mostly sleep-onset disorders. They also showed more difficulties in temperamental characteristics, such as attentional focusing, inhibitory control, and impulsivity than children with other clinical disorders. They presented also more often a language's delay. As for the mothers of children with regulation disorder, they showed lower levels of facilitative positioning, interest in engagement, adaptation and awareness of the child's actions, than mothers of children with others clinical disorders. They attempted to interrupt and to intrude on the child's activity more frequently and showed more negative affect than other mothers. Thus, mothers of children with regulation disorder displayed more maladaptive interactions than mothers of children with other clinical disorders. With regard to child's play, responsiveness, opposition attitude, negative and positive affect towards the mother were not different between children with regulation disorder, and children with other clinical disorders. Maladaptive interactions of mothers of group 1 do not seem to be due neither to children's opposition attitude and negative affect nor to their lack of interest in interaction with the mother during the free play sequence. ConclusionThis study attempts to show the effect of clinical disorders and temperamental characteristics on maternal interactions, and their mutual influence.

Collective and individual dimensions in peer positioning in early childhood education

The present study will shed light on peer interaction and children's positioning in preschool. Theoretically, the study takes its point of departure from the concept of interpretive reproduction, which stresses the importance of children's collective actions and participation in cultural production and reproduction. Positioning refers to how children create social order in here-and-now interactions. Video data from three preschools have been used to capture peer interaction during play and mealtime. The study contributes to early childhood research by demonstrating a collective and an individual dimension of positioning connected to children's understanding of institutional norms. In addition, irrespective of age and preschool context, bodily actions are important resources in children's positioning.

‘Let's go outside’: Icelandic teachers' views of using the outdoors

This article discusses the views of 25 Icelandic preschool and compulsory school teachers who were interviewed on the role of the outdoor environment in children's learning. The teachers reported not being afraid to take children outside. These teachers valued the learning potentials of the outdoors more than they feared the possible risks. They believed that the outdoors could provide opportunities for (a) enhancing children's play and learning (b) promoting children's health, well-being, and courage, and (c) affecting children's views, knowledge, and actions towards sustainability.

Approaching Social Robots Through Playfulness and Doing-It-Yourself: Children in Action

This work reports on a pilot study devoted to investigate whether the direct experience of building a robot by children enables them to obtain a more effective and complex learning of what a robot is. The study consists of an experiment carried out with eighteen pupils of the same age, attending a secondary school in Udine (Italy). The experiment was aimed to allow children to build up a simple robot, and in this experience, the children were supported by two researchers and by one of their teachers. The results show that this concrete experience activated in the children affective, emotional, physical, and social dimensions and brought them to the development of a more sophisticate conceptualization of robots. The learning by doing approach was quite effective also in strengthening the children’s social behavior and improving their mechanical knowledge and manual abilities.

To the letter: early readers trust print-based over oral instructions to guide their actions.

Children have many opportunities to learn from others through oral and written sources. Recent evidence suggests that early readers place more trust in written over oral testimony when learning names for unfamiliar objects. Across three studies, we examined whether the authority of print extends beyond mere naming to guide children's actions in the physical world. In Study 1, 3- to 6-year-olds received conflicting oral and print-based advice from two puppets about how to operate a novel apparatus. Whereas pre-readers were indiscriminate in their trust, early readers preferred to follow the print-based advice. In Study 2, we replicated this finding, controlling for the amount of corroborating evidence presented by both sources, and the location of the print. In Study 3, we explored whether readers' preference for print-based information was due to a global preference for external representations, or a more specific preference for text. Children were presented with conflicting instructions based on text versus a coloured circle. Whereas pre-readers preferred to follow the colour circle, readers preferred to follow the text. Together, the results suggest that when children learn to read, they rapidly come to regard the written word as a particularly authoritative source of information about how to act in the world.

Unpacking Ideas of Sexuality in Childhood: What do primary teachers and parents say?

AbstractChildren who engage in perceived sexual actions face possible marginalization, isolation and exclusion in schools. The author's counselling practice included numerous examples where effects of adults' understanding have led to over reactive and punitive responses on children. This article complements a political ethic of social justice and supporting children's agency—that is, children as actors and childhood as being and becoming. Teachers and parents of primary school children were interviewed as part of a current doctoral project on discourses of childhood sexuality in Aotearoa, New Zealand. In focus groups and individual interviews, six teachers and seven parents of children in one primary school responded to vignettes on children's actions designed from counselling and anecdotal evidence of children's experiences in New Zealand primary schools. Participants' thoughts, ideas and reflections, including personal stories, were stimulated by the vignettes. Their understandings and perceptions of s...

The construction of moral agency in mother–child conversations about helping and hurting across childhood and adolescence.

This study examined mother-child conversations about children's and adolescents' past harmful and helpful actions. The sample included 100 mothers and their 7-, 11-, or 16-year-old children; each dyad discussed events when the child (a) helped a friend and (b) hurt a friend. Analyses suggested that conversations about help may serve to facilitate children's sense of themselves as prosocial moral agents; mothers focused on children's feelings of pride, positive judgments of the child's behavior, and positive insights about the child's characteristics that could be drawn from the event. In turn, conversations about harm were more elaborated and contentious than those about help, and reflected more complex maternal goals; although mothers highlighted children's wrongdoing (e.g., by noting negative consequences of the child's actions for others), they also engaged in a variety of strategies that may support children's ability to reconcile their harmful actions with a positive self-view (e.g., by noting what children did do well or their capacity for repair). With respect to age effects, results revealed that older children played an increasingly active and spontaneous role in discussions. Furthermore, as compared with 7-year-olds, conversations with 11- and 16-year-olds focused more on psychological insights that could be drawn from experiences and less on children's concrete harmful and helpful actions. Overall, results illuminate the processes whereby conversations with mothers may further children's developing understandings of their own and others' moral agency, and how discussions of prosocial and transgressive moral experiences may provide distinct but complementary opportunities for moral socialization.

Young Children's Emerging Understandings of the Measurement of mass

THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES INSIGHTS into young children's emerging understandings of the measurement of mass. Findings from a teaching experiment that delivered lessons offering rich learning experiences regarding concepts of mass to children of six to eight years of age (Years 1 and 2) suggest that, while the basic idea of direct measurement may look simple, the learning of mass measurement can involve complex mental accomplishments for young children. The lessons are described briefly to communicate the opportunities for exploration that they provided. Examples of children's actions and reasoning as they experimented, theorised, and challenged each other in their learning are also described. Complexities and accomplishments in these young children's emerging understandings are highlighted and discussed.

Fractions as Subtraction: An Activity‐Oriented Perspective from Elementary Children

A sample of third‐, fourth‐, and fifth‐grade student responses to the question “What is a fraction?” were examined to gain an understanding of how children in upper elementary grades make sense of fractions. Rather than measure children's understanding of fractions relative to mathematically conventional part–whole constructions of fractions, we attempted to understand children's actions and processes. A small but nontrivial group of children used subtraction (takeaway and removal) as a framework for understanding how fractions were created and written. An analysis of the content of their responses as well as a comparison of the performance of these children with that of children who used other ways of describing fractions suggests that the use of subtraction may be a reasonable (or at least not harmful) way for children to begin to access concepts related to fractions. Also, this study suggests that attention to children's understanding through the lens of children's activity might reveal ways of thinking and insights that are masked when we compare children's thinking in more structured research settings.