French Preschoolers Research Articles

The impact of the Montessori Education on early number learning in French pre-schools

There is a paucity of research on Montessori Education's impact on learning, especially in France. In this article, we present a study comparing the development of early number learning in preschoolers through Montessori Education with “conventional” education in France. Using a cross-sectional design and random assignment of children, we evaluated 131 French preschoolers (aged 5-6) enrolled at the same public school following either Montessori Education or conventional education over three years. Students were evaluated with the Woodcock-Johnson III (WJ-III) Applied Problems sub-test and a test designed by researchers in math education. The Montessori curriculum was associated with outcomes that were comparable to the conventional curriculum on math.

On historical origins of preschool education: Pedagogical activity and concept of Marie Pape-Carpantier (1815-1878)

The system of preschool education, which is currently undergoing the process of transformation, needs to have its contents updated and innovative technologies implemented into the organization of educational process in preschool education institutions. To implement the abovesaid, it is valuable to make an attempt at retrospective consideration of the origins of the preschool education system, which outlines the relevance of the suggested research. The purpose of this scientific inquiry lied in performing a historical and pedagogical analysis of the activities and concept suggested by the founder of French preschool education, Marie Pape-Carpantier, and in identifying its progressive views in accordance with modern considerations. To achieve the stated goal, a combination of the following methods was used: theoretical analysis, synthesis and concretization, historical and pedagogical (retrospective and chronological-structural), pedagogical historiography, systematization and generalization. The article reveals peculiarities in development of public preschool education in France in the middle of the 19th century, based on the study of pedagogical heritage by Marie Pape-Carpantier (1815-1878). The author highlights historical significance of the French pedagogue Marie Pape-Carpantier in the context of biographical data regarding both her immediate work with preschoolers in shelter rooms and training of qualified personnel for such institutions. The research puts emphasis on the means of education applied by the French pedagogue in shelter rooms to engage in physical, mental, moral, labor and aesthetic education of children. The article singles out main progressive ideas regarding organization of educational process with children of preschool age: consideration of every child’s individual development and current level of their knowledge, compliance with principles of cooperation, moral behaviour, visual aids, activity-based approach (in particular, use of games), and requirements to teachers. The scientific and practical value of this research is envisaged in supplementing the teaching material of the educational component “History of Preschool Pedagogics” with information on the founder of French public preschool education Marie Pape-Carpantier

French preschool and primary teachers' attitude towards finger counting

Teachers' beliefs and attitudes are known to guide the type of activities they implement in their classrooms. A traditional conception that finger counting is merely a back-up when children fail to use more sophisticated and efficient strategies could therefore prevent teachers from encouraging children's use of fingers in arithmetic tasks. However, the potential benefit of finger counting for young learners has been recently documented and setting aside its practice within classrooms may hinder children's mathematical skill development. It is therefore important to establish whether there is a discrepancy between teacher's beliefs regarding finger counting and the latest discoveries in this field of research. To this aim, we interrogated 413 teachers from preschool to Grade 5. We found that, despite being generally positive towards finger counting, teachers think that finger counting is typical of children who present math difficulties or lack of confidence, even during the first years of learning. These results are discussed considering what is known and what remains to be determined in the current scientific literature.

Style in a school community—“Ne” deletion in French preschool

AbstractThis article explores the question of style in a school community, through negation use among the adults and children in a French preschool. Thirteen adults and 61 pupils aged 3–6 years were followed over a period of 2.5 years. The findings draw on a corpus of oral data collected in an unsupervised manner and comprising almost 640,000 transcribed words (428,100 for the children and 210,241 for the adults). The findings show, on the one hand, that the teachers adapt stylistically to their interlocutors and that their professional stance leads to more formal speech and, on the other hand, that the children's use of bipartite negation is marginal before the age of 6 years and does not present notable stylistic variations.

Educators' perspectives on working with a humanoid robot in a French preschool class for autistic children

Humanoid robots have shown to provide interesting perspectives for autistic children. Yet, few studies have looked at educators' point of view on the use of such robots in educational settings. This paper presents a case study of the use of a humanoid robot, NAO, in a French preschool class dedicated to autistic children. Our work focuses on the perspectives of the adults working with these children. We interviewed the professional staff about changes in their teaching due to the presence of the robot, about the effects on the pupils' behaviour, and about the collaboration between the special needs teacher, the special needs support worker and the operational specialist from the digital education department of the district academic head office. Four themes were identified: joint reflection and collaboration when working with NAO, working with NAO, impact of NAO on pupils, impact of NAO on adults. The professionals underscored the necessity of adopting certain attitudes, in particular, the most neutral facial expression possible, so as not to disturb the children's learning process. They were under the impression that the robot had a beneficial effect on the pupils in terms of learning and social skills, and that it facilitated collaboration among them.

Identifying Linguistic Markers of French-Speaking Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder: Which Tasks Matter?

This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating French-speaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax has not been identified as a special area of weakness when compared with lexicosemantics in French preschoolers with DLD. Since there is evidence that subject-verb number agreement is consolidated in later childhood, one might expect morphosyntax to be a particular weakness and marker of French DLD only in (pre)adolescence. We administered 20 subtasks that assessed linguistic and phonological working memory skills of two groups: 17 adolescents clinically identified as having DLD (M = 14.1 years) and 20 (pre)teens with TL (M = 12.2 years). Using robust statistics that are less affected by outliers, we selected the most discriminating subtasks between our groups, calculated their optimal cutoff score, and derived diagnostic accuracy statistics. We combined these subtasks in a multivariable model to identify which subtasks contributed the most to the identification of DLD. Seven subtasks were selected as discriminating between our groups, and three showed outstanding diagnostic accuracy: Recalling Sentences, a multiword task assessing lexicosemantic skills, and a subject-verb number agreement production task. When combined, we found that the latter contributed the most to our multivariable model. This study provides evidence that the most relevant markers to identify DLD in French teenagers are tasks assessing lexicosemantics and morphosyntactic domains, and that morphosyntax should be considered an important area of weakness in French-speaking teenagers with DLD. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21753932.

Family Socioecological Correlates of Lifestyle Patterns in Early Childhood: A Cross-Sectional Study from the EDEN Mother-Child Cohort.

Energy balance-related behaviors (EBRBs), i.e., diet, sedentary behavior, physical activity, and sleep, combine into lifestyle patterns, which we aim to identify in French preschoolers and analyze their family correlates within the framework of a comprehensive socioecological model. Parental questionnaires provided information about family characteristics and children’s EBRBs for 978 5-year-olds of the EDEN cohort. We used principal component analysis to derive lifestyle patterns from EBRBs and hierarchical multivariable linear regressions to assess their associations with family socio-demographics, parent health/behaviors, and parent-child interactions. Analyses were stratified by sex. Of the three lifestyle patterns identified (unhealthy, healthy, and mixed), the mixed pattern differed the most between sexes. Lower parental education, suboptimal maternal diet, TV during meals, and later bedtime were associated with higher adherence to unhealthy patterns. Children cognitively stimulated at home and boys of mothers not employed adhered more to the healthy pattern. Older siblings (for girls) and higher engagement of parents in leisure-time physical activity (for boys) were related to greater adherence to mixed patterns. The identification of various correlates from multiple socioecological levels suggests that tackling the potentially synergistic effect of lifestyle patterns on health requires addressing processes relevant to the parent-child dimension and structural barriers parents may encounter.

Emotion knowledge, social behaviour and locomotor activity predict the mathematic performance in 706 preschool children

What are the foundational abilities that young children must develop at the beginning of school for their future academic success? Little is known about how emotion knowledge, social behaviour, and locomotor activity are associated and how these abilities may be predictors of academic-mathematic performance (less correlated with the children’s SES than pre-reading and linguistic achievement) in a large cohort of preschool children. Here we show that emotion knowledge, locomotor activity, social behaviour, and academic-mathematic performance are interrelated in 706 French preschool children aged 3 to 6. Mediation analyses reveal that the increase in academic-mathematic performance is explained by the increases in emotion knowledge and social behaviour and, in turn, children with a greater comprehension of emotions tend to have better locomotor skills and higher academic-mathematic scores. Additionally, sequential mediation analysis reveals that the increase in emotion knowledge, locomotor activity and social behaviour partially explains the increase in academic-mathematic performance. These results are discussed in relation to three possible mechanisms. Our findings are consistent with the political and scientific consensus on the importance of social-emotional abilities in the academic world at the beginning of school and suggest adding locomotor activity to these foundational abilities.

Early Numeracy Assessment In French preschool: structural analysis and links with children’s characteristics

ABSTRACT The development of early numeracy skills in preschoolers is an important predictor of future academic performance. A multiplicity of tasks or tests measure early numeracy skills in the English-language. Nevertheless, no tools are currently in French for evaluating and monitoring the development of young children’s early numeracy skills. The present study addressed this situation by creating a set of early numeracy tasks in French. In addition to examining the psychometric properties of those early numeracy tasks, we used multiple regression analyses to examine possible links between early numeracy skills and children’s characteristics (sex, age, socioeconomic status). Results obtained on a sample of 167 French kindergarten students (Mean = 5.17 years, Standard Deviation = 0.59) showed the tests to have good psychometric properties. Moreover, model fit for our data were better for a single-factor model than for a two-factor model. In addition, we found links between different dimensions of early numeracy and both children’s age and socioeconomic status.

Information Structure and Scope Interactions: Disjunction Wide Scope Induced by Focus

In this paper we investigate the scopal reading of disjunctions in French negative sentences with pre-schoolers. We posit that the French disjunctor “ou” does not fit the traditional disjunction PPI/non-PPI dichotomy according to which a wide scope is taken by a PPI disjunction and a narrow scope when the disjunction is not a PPI. We hypothesized that focus could be a succesful scopal manipulator. Using Truth Value Judgment Tasks (TVJT), we tested French pre-schoolers' scopal reading of negated disjunctions in a neutral prosody condition and with prosodic focus on the disjunctor in a between subject design. We found that as predicted, prosodic focus often enduced participants to adopt a disjunction wide scope reading whereas a disjunction narrow scope reading was favored in the neutral prosody condition. This confirmed our hypothesis that focus can manipulate disjunction scope paramaters. It also shows that, when the disjunction is focalised, children have access to the disjunction wide scope reading earlier than previously thought. Finally, we can conclude that the distinction between PPI-disjunctor vs. non-PPI disjunctor languages needs to be more fine-grained.

Development of a French‐language early literacy scale: structural analysis and links between the dimensions of early literacy

BackgroundThe development of early literacy skills in preschoolers is an important predictor of future academic performance. Four main domains of early literacy are currently observed: letter knowledge, vocabulary, phonological awareness and oral comprehension. A multiplicity of tasks or tests measures these domains in English language. However, there are currently no French‐language tools for evaluating and monitoring the early literacy abilities of young children in francophone contexts.MethodsThis paper addresses this lack by presenting a new French‐language scale – the Echelle Préscolaire de Littératie Emergente (EPLE) – for assessing the early literacy skills of preschoolers. In addition to examining the EPLE's psychometric properties, we used path analysis to determine possible links between different dimensions of early literacy and children's characteristics (sex, age and socioeconomic status).ResultsThis study involves 167 French preschoolers (mean = 5.17 years, standard deviation = 0.59) attending kindergarten. All the participants were tested individually, and a specific entry in the tasks was proposed depending on the age of the children. First, the EPLE had good psychometric properties. Then, factor analysis of the data collected revealed a similar hierarchical factor structure as found in the literature. In addition, we found links between the four dimensions of early literacy measured by the EPLE and both children's age and socioeconomic status.ConclusionThe EPLE creates several new opportunities for early literacy research in French‐speaking contexts. First, this tool reduces the gap in the field of testing young children skills. Then, it allows the comparison with worldwide researches. Moreover, this tool proposes pedagogical implications. In the next few years, the EPLE will be used by teachers or school psychologists to test the early competences of French children.

Trends in prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity in a community-based programme: The VIF Programme.

Obesity in children is considered the main childhood health problem. To assess the impact of 7-year community-based interventions on the trend prevalence of overweight and obesity in French preschool children and primary school children between 2008 and 2015. Two cross-sectional studies were performed in the last grade of every pre-school and primary schools of 6 cities in 2008 and 2015. In 2008 and 2015, 3387 children and 3415 children (aged 5 and 11 years old) participated in the 2 surveys. Interventions consisted to promote physical activity, healthy diet, sleep habits and well-being. Prevalence of overweight and obesity were defined according to age- and sex-specific BMI cut-off points. Priority education area of the schools was also recorded. Prevalence of overweight and obesity decreased significantly between 2008 and 2015 in children from pre-schools (18.1% vs 13.0%) and primary schools (20.9% vs 16.9%) (P < 0.05). No effects of priority education area and sex were found related to the decrease of prevalence in overweight and obesity. Our results show that over 7 years period, the community-based intervention has a positive impact on the overweight and obesity prevalence in childhood. These results are promising and encouraging in addressing obesity and related issues in French young boys and girls.

Cross-Cultural Differences in the Valuing of Dominance by Young Children

AbstractDevelopmental research suggests that young children tend to value dominant individuals over subordinates. This research, however, has nearly exclusively been carried out in Western cultures, and cross-cultural research among adults has revealed cultural differences in the valuing of dominance. In particular, it seems that Japanese culture, relative to many Western cultures, values dominance less. We conducted two experiments to test whether this difference would be observed in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, preschoolers in France and in Japan were asked to identify with either a dominant or a subordinate. French preschoolers identified with the dominant, but Japanese preschoolers were at chance. Experiment 2 revealed that Japanese preschoolers were more likely to believe a subordinate than a dominant individual, both compared to chance and compared to previous findings among French preschoolers. The convergent results from both experiments thus reveal an early emerging cross-cultural difference in the valuing of dominance.

A Preliminary Exploration of the Inclusion of a Child With Autism in a Preschool With Complex Dynamic Systems

Based on the complex dynamic system approach, this research aimed to study the variability of the typical configurations of interactions between the adults’ participation and the engagement of a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in two activities proposed in a French preschool. The classroom sessions were filmed once a month for 8 months and focused on two activities (free play and adult-led activities). The results of this preliminary exploration revealed that the typical interactions developed differently over time. Indeed, during activities that are adult led, observation behaviors with a passive participation of the adult intensified. Moreover, active engagement behaviors, without and with adult participation, increased meaningfully during free play.

Clitics as input to the acquisition of verbal transitivity in French

AbstractWe investigate the effect of French clitic construction on verb learning. In French, object pronouns precede the verb, and the canonical direct object position remains empty. We test whether children treat such contexts as input for transitivity (since a direct object is morphologically identified) or optional transitivity (due to the empty direct object position). Forty-eight monolingual French preschoolers heard verb input with clitics and noun phrases as direct objects, in two input conditions: obligatory transitivity, and mixed optional transitivity. Results show that children are sensitive to the input, but produce more sentences with null implicit objects in the clitic conditions. This provides evidence that specific properties of a language (e.g. clitic constructions), affect the acquisition of verbal classes.

Analysis of Young Children’s Technology Difficulties and Challenges in Operating and Using Educational Application in Tablet

Young children between 3-5 years old are in a period of high development of cognitive abilities, like language, literacy and painting. With more access to tablets, it is not only possible to include this technology in teaching curricula but they also show great promise as a learning instrument. In the aim to glean more information concerning children's cognitive development at this precious stage by using a tablet, we invited 25 young children (3-5 years old) coming from a French preschool to participate in this study. We arranged for every child to play an application on the tablet twice a week for two months and adaptively and gradually accommodated instructions to the children according to their performance. Lastly, we analyzed three typical modes of operation on the tablet: simple screen touch, gesture interaction and tilting based on gravity. We found that tilting is the most difficult part for most of the children and challenges are mainly caused by technology difficulty rather than content difficulty.

Night-waking trajectories and associated factors in French preschoolers from the EDEN birth-cohort

Night waking in preschoolers has been associated with adverse health outcomes in cross-sectional studies, but has rarely been analyzed in a longitudinal setting. Therefore, little is known about the evolution of night waking in early childhood. The objectives of the present study were: to identify night-waking trajectories in preschoolers, and to examine the risk factors associated with those trajectories. Analyses were based on the French birth-cohort study EDEN, which recruited 2002 pregnant women between 2003 and 2006. Data on a child's night waking at the ages of two, three, and five, six years, and potential confounders, were collected through parental self-reported questionnaires. Night-waking trajectories were computerized using group-based trajectory modeling on 1346 children. Two distinct developmental patterns were identified: the “2–5 rare night-waking” (77% of the children) and the “2–5 common night-waking” pattern. Logistic regressions were performed to identify the factors associated with the trajectories. Risk factors for belonging to the “2–5 common night-waking” trajectory were: exposure to passive smoking at home, daycare in a collective setting, watching television for extended periods, bottle feeding at night, high emotionality, and low shyness. This approach allowed identification of risk factors associated with night waking during a critical age window, and laid the groundwork for identifying children at higher risk of deleterious sleep patterns. Those risk factors were mainly living habits, which indicated that prevention and intervention programs could be highly beneficial in this population.

Breastfeeding Duration and Cognitive Development at 2 and 3 Years of Age in the EDEN Mother–Child Cohort

To investigate the dose-response relationship between breastfeeding duration and cognitive development in French preschool children. In the French EDEN Mother-Child Cohort Study, we evaluated language ability with the Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) in 1387 2-year-old children and overall development with the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ) in 1199 3-year-old children. Assessments were compared between breastfed and non-breastfed children and also according to breastfeeding duration in multivariable linear models, controlling for a wide range of potential confounders. We tested departure from linearity. After adjustments, ever-breastfed children scored 3.7 ± 1.8 (P = .038) points higher than never-breastfed children on the CDI and 6.2 ± 1.9 (P = .001) points higher on the ASQ. Among breastfed children, exclusive and any-breastfeeding durations were positively associated with both CDI and ASQ scores. The fine motor domain of ASQ was associated with any-breastfeeding duration, and the problem solving domain with exclusive-breastfeeding duration. We did not observe significant departures from linearity. No interactions were found between the child's sex, parental education or socioeconomic status, and breastfeeding duration. Longer breastfeeding duration was associated with better cognitive and motor development in 2- and 3-year-old children and a dose-response relationship was suggested.

Acquisition of the concept of teaching and its relationship with theory of mind in French 3- to 6-year olds

Little is known about how and when preschoolers master the concept of teaching, particularly in relation to the acquisition of theory of mind (ToM). We investigated the relationship between the two in children aged 3–6 years old. One hundred and seventeen French preschool pupils answered questions about different teaching situations illustrated in ten stories involving knowledge differences and/or false belief. Four change-of-location ToM stories were also administered. Our results indicate a developmental progression from understanding teaching situations to grasping the notion of knowledge gaps. Moreover, they confirm that ToM seems to be involved in understanding more complex teaching situations.

Étude et catégorisation de pratiques effectives entre professeurs et auxiliaires de vie scolaire (AVS) à l’école primaire

The law “for equal rights and opportunity, the participation and the citizenship of disabled persons”, dated February the eleventh, imposes to register all the students in their school district and to make it easy for disabled people to be schooled within the mainstream education system, as often as possible. School-life assistant or auxiliaire de vie scolaire (AVS) appear to aid and to guide disabled students. There are two types of AVS: the AVS individual (AVSi) who guides only one disabled student schooled in an ordinary class and and the AVS collectif (AVS co) who acts in special classes with disabled students. In this article, we throw light on the way the AVSi and the AVS co speak of the aid and guidance they provide in their practice in situ. We show how is organised and evolves each dissymetrical system ( système bicéphale dyssimétrique, [Rev Fr Pedagog 151 (2005) 91–109]) made up of a teacher and a AVS, to help a disabled student. We collected the data in a special class (Classe d’intégration scolaire or Clis) for students suffering from a mental handicap and in an ordinary mid-class in French preschool education. We filmed two dyads composed of a teacher and an AVS in their ordinary practice and we interviewed these four actors. We observe the existence of differing systems between these two classes. The particular form of collaboration between teacher and AVS, shows that in fact, the actors’ respective places of and the way they share out the task depend on the system in which they work.