Early Childhood Contexts Research Articles

Engagement and Immersion in Digital Play: Supporting Young Children's Digital Wellbeing.

For many families, young children’s engagement with screen-based technology is an ongoing concern in terms of physical, social and cognitive development. They are uneasy with the difficulty children have disengaging from screens and concerned that this behavior is obsessive or a sign of addiction. However, technology is recognized as having a “rightful role” in early childhood contexts. This scoping paper reports on a review of literature relating to digital play for children aged birth to five years, with the aim of further understanding digital wellbeing. Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory serves as a theoretical framework for understanding why many young children enjoy digital play and become deeply engaged, with a disconnect between how young children and adults perceive digital play. Concerns about children’s deep immersion with digital play are interrogated to understand the connections with perceived addictive traits. The review highlights the critical importance of supporting children’s agency and digital citizenship skills from a young age, including the ability to critique content, balance screen-time with non-screen time and to develop self-control and self-regulation as a means to promote long-term positive outcomes for children in their digital lifeworlds and beyond.

Everyday literacy practices: Normalising the school literate child

Background: One can argue that literacy practices work to produce forms of literacy knowledge and literate children in early childhood contexts. However, one needs to interrogate how these literacy practices create technologies of power that construct and normalise the school ready literate child.Aim: The ethnographic study employed in this article explored everyday literacy practices in early childhood contexts that were considered ‘usual’, the kinds of literate children these practices engendered and its normalising effects on children and teachers.Settings: The study was conducted in two early childhood centres with two early childhood teachers and teaching children between the ages of 3 and 4.Methods: The study was qualitative in nature and used participant observation. A genealogical analysis of literacy practices showed how technologies of power were embodied in different literacy practices that worked to construct and normalise the school ready child in different ways.Results: The findings revealed that everyday literacy practices were used to produce a literate child through disciplinary processes of observation, normalisation and examination. These literacy practices operated in covert ways where school readiness was tied to educational success. However, during this process of normalisation, children began to [re]position themselves within the literacy space, showing individual agency and self-regulation.Conclusion: Although the findings of this study are not generalisable, it has implications for how literacy and literacy practices are conceptualised in early childhood settings. This article advocates a reconceptualisation of school readiness by questioning embedded practices within the competence model of school readiness and calls for the early childhood field to dissect incisively what and who are advantaged and disadvantaged through early literacy practices.

Values Education in Singapore’s Early Childhood Context

Early childhood spans from birth to eight years of age, comprising preschool and lower primary levels in Singapore. Preschool education begins from birth to six years, after which children enter primary school at the age of seven. This paper discusses values education in the first eight years of children s lives in both preschool and primary school contexts. It analyses the Early Years Development Framework and the Nurturing Early Learners: A Curriculum Framework for Kindergartens at preschool level, and Character and Citizenship Education at primary level, and examines how these frameworks affect values education and contribute to the moral development of young children in Singapore.</br></br> Key Words: Values education, Early childhood, Singapore case study

A Chinese lens on children’s learning dispositions

ABSTRACT The notion of learning dispositions has extended conceptions of learning in early childhood education to incorporate dimensions such as habits of mind and patterns of behaviour. This paper conceptualizes learning dispositions through a Chinese lens, and with conceptualizing this notion, explores associated pedagogical practices. The data are drawn from the field notes in an early childhood classroom and focus group interviews with sixteen early childhood teachers and three early childhood experts. The evidence indicates that disposition is an essential component on the participants’ construction of children’s learning as well as a deliberate focus of teachers’ teaching. However, it is also revealed that children’s learning dispositions are something of paradox, offering the potential of a learner-centred pedagogy and yet are grounded in teaching plans, prescribed goals and specific activities. Findings interrogate the positioning of learning dispositions in relation to the wider discourse of children’s learning in the Chinese early childhood context.

What’s Happening to Shared Picture Book Reading in an Era of Phonics First?

AbstractLearning about being a reader is more than teaching phonics. A pilot study of shared picture book reading in early childhood education as a means to support young children in developing a broader understanding of literacy, in addition to phonics and phonological awareness, is discussed. The Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation (ELLCO) (Pre‐K) tool was administered in six early childhood contexts, revealing a range of strengths and weaknesses in classrooms observed. There was little evidence of picture book reading playing an integral part of the early childhood literacy programs. Shared reading activities were absent in some contexts. In others, books were selected on the basis of length or a phonics focus. In an era of phonics first, this article is a timely reminder that shared reading of quality children’s literature can support development of a range of reading strategies including phonics while developing a joy for reading.

Utilizing Quick Response Codes to Extend Instruction in Early Childhood Contexts

Utilizing Quick Response Codes to Extend Instruction in Early Childhood Contexts

“Monsters Are Coming!”: Learning Literacy and Playing Games

Background/Context There are recent trends of bringing highly defined, teacher-directed pedagogies into early-childhood contexts in Australia, the United States. and other Western contexts. While the justification for these moves is often the improvement of outcomes for young children, they ignore the large body of research that attests to the social, emotional, and academic benefits of children having time to play and to experience educational programs founded in play-based pedagogies. Focus of the study In this study, we were interested in considering how young children name their worlds in education contexts in which literacies and sustainability education are brought together as educational concepts. This article reports on the playing of one game over time and considers the opportunities that were created by the playing of the game and the competence of the young children in using the game to collaborate, to learn literacy, and to make spaces for other everyday business together. Setting The fieldwork which produced the data for this article involved two researchers attending a suburban Australian early-childhood education context regularly for one year. Participants The children and educators of the center were engaged in an approved program, in the year before school starts within Australian requirements. Therefore the children ranged in age from 3 to 5 years. Research design This article reports on a qualitative study of one class of young children and their educators. Data were collected during fieldwork visits over a period of one year. We observed the children's engagement in outdoor play, collecting data in the form of short video recordings, still images, field notes, and texts produced by the children. Conclusions Our analysis provides evidence that children can demonstrate competent understandings of how language, bodies, movement, and space position themselves and others. The children involved competently collaborated and used language and texts to get along and to sustain a game over many months. They were only able to achieve this because they were given space to play, to own and govern spaces of play, and to problem-solve together as issues arose. The opportunity to direct themselves and their friends was vital as they developed respectful language and literacy practices.

Introducing augmented reality in early childhood literacy learning

Augmented reality (AR) as an emerging technology has gradually been incorporated into educational contexts; however, the cases that incorporate AR into early childhood contexts are underrepresented and especially scant in the literacy domain. Aiming to measure the impact of AR on early childhood learning and motivation in the literacy domain, this study brought an application into six pre-kindergarten classrooms by introducing three experimental classrooms to an AR centre while others engaged with a two-dimensional (2D) version of the same material. Bayesian analysis revealed that rapid letter naming rates grew for all children involved in the study. It increased by 6.28% among children in the experimental AR group and 3.35% in the control 2D group. Growth in rates of motivation was similar among experimental (11.5%) and control (10.9%) groups. These findings suggest that three-dimensional images of letters might help with rapid letter naming skills, and animations available in both versions may be the reason of increases in motivation. Teacher interviews presented positive views towards AR, and instructional implications were provided by teachers for incorporating the technology into early childhood classrooms.

Conceptualising and measuring domain‐specific content knowledge of early childhood educators: A systematic review

The role of domain‐specific content knowledge is discussed controversially for the early childhood context. Therefore, this review aims at untangling the research on domain‐specific content knowledge for early childhood educators by systematically reviewing the conceptual and operational definition of and results on early childhood educators’ content knowledge in different domains. Using the scientific databases ERIC, PsycInfo and Web of Sciences, we identified 36 studies on early childhood educators’ domain‐specific content knowledge. By comparing these studies, we found that conceptualizations of early childhood educators’ content knowledge move on a continuum between a scientific related perspective and a practice related perspective. The scientific related perspective defines content knowledge as the knowledge of key concepts, facts and rules of the domain integrating knowledge taught in primary, secondary or upper secondary school. The practice related perspective includes knowledge of key concepts, facts and rules of the domain limited to the knowledge explicitly relevant for teaching in early childhood education as well as selected domain‐specific knowledge of children and teaching. Our review shows that the results and implications drawn by the study authors depend on how these authors conceptualize early childhood educators’ content knowledge on this continuum. Further research, therefore, needs to consider carefully how early childhood educators’ content knowledge is conceptualized. The paper further discusses gaps in this research field, such as validating methods for measuring early childhood educators’ content knowledge or implementing more rigorous experimental designs to examine effects of early childhood educators’ content knowledge.

Parenting and Child Behaviour Barriers to Managing Screen Time With Young Children

The impact of excessive screen use on child health and development is now a public health concern, and research efforts are focused on finding ways to moderate screen use. To date, the focus has mainly been on school-aged children and adolescents, and the early childhood context has been comparatively neglected. Moreover, relationships between factors likely to influence screen use by young children (e.g., child behaviour, parenting style and self-efficacy) remain largely unexplored. Our study aimed to test relationships between parenting style, parents’ self-efficacy, parental distress, child behaviour, and young children’s screen time. We used a cross-sectional study design. Parents (N = 106) of young children (aged 0–4 years) living in Australia completed an online survey which assessed parent-reported child screen use, screen time-related child behaviour problems, parents’ self-efficacy for managing child behaviour and screen time, parents’ beliefs about the positive/negative effects of screen time, parenting style, general child adjustment and parent efficacy, and parent distress. Correlation coefficients revealed relationships between dysfunctional parenting styles, screen time-related child behaviour problems, and parent self-efficacy for dealing with these behaviours. Using hierarchical multiple regression models, children’s screen time behaviour problems explained the greatest variance in parents’ self-efficacy for managing screen time, and parents’ self-efficacy for managing child screen time explained the greatest variance in parent-reported child screen time. Further research is needed to disentangle these relationships; however, preliminary results suggest that child behaviour difficulties and parents’ self-efficacy warrant further investigation as potentially useful targets for interventions aiming to improve screen use in early childhood.

Dual Language Development of Chinese 3- and 4-Year-Olds: Associations with the Family Context and Teachers’ Language Use

ABSTRACT Research findings: This study examined the dual language development and experience of the understudied Chinese dual language learners (DLLs). Twice in the preschool/pre-k year (about 4 months apart), we assessed 39 Chinese 3- and 4-year-old DLLs’ receptive vocabularies in English and Chinese, interviewed 37 parents about the language use and richness of each language in the family context, and video-recorded activities in 10 classrooms to analyze teachers’ and DLLs’ language use (word types) in English and Chinese. DLLs’ receptive vocabulary grew in both languages but only English, not Chinese, language use in the classroom increased across the year. Both in the family and early childhood contexts, Chinese DLLs experienced richer and increasing English exposure, while the Chinese exposure was impoverished and stagnant. Associations were found between both contexts and DLLs’ dual language development. Practice or policy: These results highlight a central role of the family context in supporting the language development of DLLs and a significant and irreplaceable role of the early childhood teachers. Families and early childhood teachers need to be supported with more knowledge and resources to ensure the continued development of DLLs in both languages, and especially the home language, to help DLLs achieve bilingualism.

Visual arts pedagogy in early childhood contexts: The baggage of self-efficacy beliefs, pedagogical knowledge and limited pre-service training

Visual arts provisions are central to children’s holistic, play-based learning, yet the visual arts self-efficacy beliefs and subject content knowledge of early childhood educators influence pedagogical choices. When early childhood educators lack the visual arts confidence, skills, and knowledge required to effectively support children’s visual arts learning and engagement, children’s learning in the visual arts domain may be restricted; resulting in a negative cycle of influence whereby the next generation are denied their right to access visual languages. Qualitative case study research explored the visual arts beliefs and pedagogy of 12 degree qualified and vocationally trained early childhood educators. The conceptual framework, designed to to interpret and analyse the research data, aligns Dewey’s philosophies of democracy, education and art with the philosophy and visual arts praxis of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education. The research findings suggest educator’s low visual arts self-efficacy beliefs develop during childhood and are not improved by pre-service training, resulting in limited visual arts skills and knowledge. The research participants’ visual arts pedagogy appeared to be strongly influenced by the experiential ‘baggage’ they carried into their pre-service training and practice contexts, by the participants’ theoretical beliefs about children’s development and by a range of divergent beliefs about the purposes of visual art in the early childhood context. Although training has the potential to broadly inform knowledge and practice, this study suggests that unless limiting visual arts self-efficacy beliefs are disrupted by constructivist theoretical knowledge and combined with practical skills and knowledge, the visual arts curriculum offered to children may be significantly compromised.

A Teaching and Learning Tightrope: Navigating Accountability Mandates While Maintaining Sound Pedagogical Practices

This article describes the antecedents and the implications of the ‘accountability climate’ and associated ‘compliance climate’ in early childhood education through an 8-week case study of one Government-funded preschool in an under-resourced urban community. With attention to the macro- and micro-systems that situates the preschool, this study describes how the preschool achieved compliance with external mandates while maintaining pedagogically sound teaching practices. This article reaffirms that quality early childhood education opportunities are possible acrosseconomic disparities if appropriate supports are made available to teachers, students, and families. The qualitative case study, complemented by video-based fieldwork, examines local instructional practices and investigates the policies and protocols facilitating these practices. The join impact between macro- and microsystems contributed to the teachers’ successfully privileging student academic and social success within a compliance-driven ecological system. This study offers a concrete example of how supports and leadership can contribute to early childhood contexts upholding regulated compliance mandates while privileging children’s needs.

Trajectories of civic socialization in context: Examining variation among children in African American and Black immigrant families.

Little is known about how developmental experiences spanning early childhood through adolescence prepare children and youth to engage with society, and even less so for ethnically diverse Black children and youth. Building from work linking positive youth development (PYD) to civic engagement, this study examined how socialization trajectories from early childhood through adolescence in concert with early childhood experiences and contexts related to adolescent civic development. Person-centered analysis (PCA) through trajectory modeling was conducted using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K). Family-level inclusion criteria was used to identify the subsample wherein at least 1 parent identified as Black or African American (N = 3,562); 49.5% of children were female. The ECLS-K component measure of socioeconomic status (SES) indicated that most families were from low SES backgrounds (54.5%), followed by middle and upper-middle class (36.4%,), then upper-middle class and beyond (9.1%). Civic development was measured by the PYD outcomes of competence, confidence, connection to school and peers, caring, and character, which have positively accounted for civic engagement across ethnically and racially diverse youth. Findings suggest that diversity in socialization experiences, sociocultural background, and context result in differential outcomes of civic development. This builds on previous civic engagement work by affirming the importance of parental perceptions, civic opportunity, socialization practices, and context. Moreover, this work highlights ethnic diversity among Black youth in civic development and suggests that being from an immigrant family is associated with differential civic outcomes relative to their nonimmigrant counterparts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The affect(s) of literacy learning in the mud

ABSTRACT This paper draws on the social ecology of Félix Guattari, to suggest that young children learn in complex social and natural situations, in this case ‘getting muddy’. The notion of social ecology will be revived in this paper, to ensure that the human social world is embedded in and part of the natural world, with all its complexities, relations and repetitions (re: muddiness). Children learn from their mistakes, from social interaction, due to their instincts, and as part of an evolving situation, much of which is beyond their control, e.g. their attraction to mud. This paper will search for these types of learning(s) in the affect that can be discerned from teaching and learning, and specifically related to ‘muddy literacy’. One might call the combined notions that will be put to work in this paper as ‘affective literacy’, it is an affective literacy fully imbricated in muddy nature. To achieve this, the paper will attend to empirical research in the early childhood context in Australia, that has charted how children learn from inquiry based learning outdoors in mud, pictures of Aboriginal children outside (and a hand), and a mud classroom painting.

STEM Education in Early Childhood: A Review of Empirical Studies

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Various cross-disciplinary STEM learning activities were implemented in the early childhood context. Young children and their parents had rather positive attitudes towards STEM learning. In addition to educational values, the economic value of STEM learning for their family was perceived by a good number of parents, which believed that learning STEM could pave a path for their children toward future economic prosperity. Early childhood teachers perceived the values of STEM education from the learning and social perspectives while they realized various practical constrains of time, support and resources, worried about teachers’ capacity and subject knowledge, and considered students, developmental differences and safety. They were not confident to implement STEM lessons with their young students. Practice or Policy: It is urgent to present teachers a holistic picture for STEM curriculum in the EC context, covering strengthening discipline-based content learning, enhancing discipline-based integration, and preparing for the innovation-driven integration. The complete process of transferring professional knowledge (including awareness, acquisition, transformation, association, application, and externalization) should be embodied in the design of STEM professional training programs. Parents also needed more training on how to work with their children in STEM activities and scaffold their children’ learning.

Multiple perspectives on the benefits of teaching of Vietnamese to preschool children in an Australian early childhood context

ABSTRACT The cognitive, educational and economic benefits of learning a second language have been well documented in the literature. This paper reports findings on perspectives of 13 stakeholders on the benefits of a case study about teaching Vietnamese to preschoolers in a regional early childhood context in Tasmania, Australia in 2017. Using a thematic approach in analysing 13 semi-structured interviews, five main themes on the benefits of the programme for the children identified were language development, cultural and global awareness, numeracy enhancement, reading engagement, and personal development. The results showed that participating educators and parents all had positive attitudes towards the early Vietnamese language programme, believed that there were many benefits and expressed a desire for its continuity. These findings suggest that there is a need and desire for second language education in early childhood in the Tasmanian context. Therefore, policy makers, educators and researchers should provide preschools access to learning and teaching resources of a language of their choice to benefit children’s overall development and learning in early childhood, adolescence and beyond.

‘Doing’ socio-political sustainability in early childhood: Teacher-as-researcher reflective practices

Young children’s engagement in Education for Sustainability has focussed predominantly on their participation in environment-based initiatives or practices. Reasons for this include a notion that wider dimensions of sustainability, including social, political and economic areas of concern can be too complex and overwhelming for young children. When children experience learning around wider dimensions of sustainability, there is potential to develop genuine and critical understandings about global issues in a transformative and critical learning context. This article investigates how an early childhood teacher, in the role of teacher-as-researcher, engaged young children in a kindergarten classroom in an investigation of poverty as a socio-political aspect of sustainability. The authors focus on teacher-as-researcher critical reflections from action research data to contextualise how curriculum decision-making unfolded. Using critical theory as a guiding framework, the authors examine how knowledge around poverty was co-constructed between children and adults, thus unsettling the idea of teacher as ‘expert’. The authors advocate for early childhood teachers to employ a teacher-as-researcher role in sustainability education and to critically reflect on ways to embed a holistic approach to Education for Sustainability in early childhood contexts.

Research on early childhood mathematics teaching and learning

This paper reports an overview of contemporary research on early childhood mathematics teaching and learning presented at recent mathematics education research conferences and papers included in the special issue (2020–4) of ZDM Mathematics Education. The research covers the broad spectrum of educational research focusing on different content and methods in teaching and learning mathematics among the youngest children in the educational systems. Particular focus in this paper is directed to what lessons can be drawn from teaching interventions in early childhood, what facilitates children’s mathematical learning and development, and what mathematical key concepts can be observed in children. Together, these themes offer a coherent view of the complexity of researching mathematical teaching and learning in early childhood, but the research also brings this field forward by adding new knowledge that extends our understanding of aspects of mathematics education and research in this area, in the dynamic context of early childhood. This knowledge is important for future research and for the development of educational practices.

Motivation to Write: Conversations with Emergent Writers

This article describes the processes and outcomes of a research project exploring children’s motivation to write, undertaken by four pre-primary teachers in Western Australia. The teachers adopted a sociocultural theoretical framework using child centred participatory methodology, in which 109 children aged between five and six years shared their views of writing in conversation with their teacher. Thematic analysis in conjunction with statistical analysis indicated that the majority of children were motivated to write. They had a positive attitude towards writing, evidenced by their self-efficacy and were developing aspects of self-determination evidenced by their sense of ownership and control of the codes of writing. They had some understanding of the value of writing as a means of supporting reading and securing a positive future, thus enhancing their motivation to write. However, a small group of children indicated that they did not like writing, found writing hard, and did not know how or what to write. In addition, few children mentioned writing as a means of communication. The absence of purpose and audience in the children’s responses, was partly explained by the teachers’ focus on the codes of writing, potentially impacting on children’s motivation. This prompted the teachers to re-conceptualise their writing program in ways that engaged children in authentic writing tasks, while continuing to scaffold their understanding of the codes of writing. This collaborative approach to research, in ways that privilege children’s voices, has implications for informing pedagogy across a range of early childhood contexts and curriculum areas.