Young Children's Knowledge Research Articles

녹색소비 실천교육이 유아의 녹색소비 인식 및 행동에 미치는 효과

Green consumption refers to a variety of activities including use and purchase of eco-friendly products and services and disposing of products in an eco-friendly manner. The goal of this research was to evaluate the effects of a green consumption education and awareness program offered to young children in a university-sponsored daycare. The education and awareness program was designed to improve young children's knowledge and behaviors toward the environment through green consumption education. The program was presented to 22 5-year old children in 15-20 minutes sessions, once a week for 4 weeks. Evaluation of the program was carried out through individual interviews with the children and their mothers. Upon the completion of the green consumption education program, there were noticeable changes in children's knowledge and behavior toward the environment. Mothers of participating children reported that children's environmental behaviors changed significantly, displaying a stronger green consumption attitude. This study suggests that environmental educational program during early childhood educational is an effective way of improving children's perceptions of environmental and conservation practices.

An evaluation of The Great Escape: Can an interactive computer game improve young children's fire safety knowledge and behaviors?

Fire is a leading cause of unintentional injury and, although young children are at particularly increased risk, there are very few evidence-based resources available to teach them fire safety knowledge and behaviors. Using a pre-post randomized design, the current study evaluated the effectiveness of a computer game (The Great Escape) for teaching fire safety information to young children (3.5-6 years). Using behavioral enactment procedures, children's knowledge and behaviors related to fire safety were compared to a control group of children before and after receiving the intervention. The results indicated significant improvements in knowledge and fire safety behaviors in the intervention group but not the control. Using computer games can be an effective way to promote young children's understanding of safety and how to react in different hazardous situations.

Parental nutrition knowledge and attitudes as predictors of 5–6-year-old children's healthy food knowledge

Young children's knowledge about healthy food may influence the formation of their eating behaviours, and parents have a major influence on the development of children's knowledge in the early years. We investigated the extent to which parental nutrition knowledge and attitudes around food predicted young children's knowledge of healthy foods, controlling for other influences such as socio-economic status (SES) and parent education levels in a cross-sectional research design. Children were given a healthy food knowledge activity and parents completed questionnaires. Twenty primary schools in Adelaide, Australia, stratified by SES. We recruited 192 children aged 5-6 years and their parents. Structural equation modelling showed that parent nutrition knowledge predicted children's nutrition knowledge (r = 0·30, P < 0·001) independently of attitudes, SES and education level. Nutrition education for parents, targeted at low-SES areas at higher risk for obesity, may contribute to the development of healthy food knowledge in young children.

Procedural and conceptual changes in young children’s problem solving

This study analysed the different types of arithmetic knowledge that young children utilise when solving a multiple-step addition task. The focus of the research was on the procedural and conceptual changes that occur as children develop their overall problem solving approach. Combining qualitative case study with a micro-genetic approach, clinical interviews were conducted with ten 5–6-year-old children. The aim was to document how children combine knowledge of addition facts, calculation procedures and arithmetic concepts when solving a multiple-step task and how children’s application of different types of knowledge and overall solving approach changes and develops when children engage with solving the task in a series of problem solving sessions. The study documents children’s pathways towards developing a more effective and systematic approach to multiple-step tasks through different phases of their problem solving behaviour. The analysis of changes in children’s overt behaviour reveals a dynamic interplay between children’s developing representation of the task, their improved procedures and gradually their more explicit grasp of the conceptual aspects of their strategy. The findings provide new evidence that supports aspects of the “iterative model” hypothesis of the interaction between procedural and conceptual knowledge and highlight the need for educational approaches and tasks that encourage and trigger the interplay of different types of knowledge in young children’s arithmetic problem solving.

The substance and sources of young children's healthy eating and physical activity knowledge: implications for obesity prevention efforts

The prevalence of overweight among young children is increasing at an alarming rate. Global efforts to address the issue can benefit from understanding how young children's experiences across multiple contexts shape their perspectives of healthy weight. This qualitative study examines the substance and sources of young American children's knowledge related to healthy eating, physical activity and media practices. Role play and semi-structured interviews were conducted in child-care settings with 81 children aged 3-5 who represented diverse socio-economic statuses and ethnic backgrounds. Children demonstrated better understanding of the benefits of healthy eating compared with physical activity. Snacks and beverages consumed outside mealtime were less likely to be healthy even among the 40% of children who demonstrated an understanding of healthy nutrition. The majority of children's leisure activity selections involved media and minimally active pursuits. Three quarters of the children were unable to articulate reasons for healthy choices or identify the sources of their health understandings. The media was listed as source of health information more frequently than adults. Obesity prevention efforts targeting young children need to use consistent messaging across all contexts in which children develop in order to increase their understanding that physical activity and eating choices support health. Efforts need to counter inaccurate information and address the rationale for health practices. Key gaps in young children's understanding include: the importance of drinking water, that snacks are part of nutritional intake and the benefits of engaging in physical activities.

Role of Knowledge in Young Children’s Inductions :

本研究では, 幼児の帰納推論における知識の影響を検討するために, 2つの実験を行った。実験1では, 3・4・5歳児群を対象にして未知属性の一般化を行う際に, カテゴリー判断に基づいて帰納推論を行うかどうかを調べた。標準刺激に対して新奇な属性を提示し, 下位カテゴリー, 基礎カテゴリー, 上位カテゴリー, 無関連カテゴリーの各テスト刺激に対して属性があてはまるかどうかを尋ねた。また, 標準刺激と仲間であるものをテスト刺激から選択させた。その結果, 仲間だと判断していても, 外見が違うと未知属性をあてはめにくくなることが示された。実験2では, 4・5歳児群を対象にして, 未知属性と既知属性の帰納推論を直接比較した。その結果, 未知属性にくらべて既知属性においては, 分類学的カテゴリーに基づく推論が多かった。また, 実験1・2を通して, 5歳児群になると分類学的カテゴリーへの着目が増加していた。幼児は, 属性に関する既有知識を利用して帰納推論を行っていると考えられる。

"What counts in the development of young children's number knowledge?": Correction to Levine et al. (2010).

"What counts in the development of young children's number knowledge?": Correction to Levine et al. (2010).

What counts in the development of young children's number knowledge?

Prior studies indicate that children vary widely in their mathematical knowledge by the time they enter preschool and that this variation predicts levels of achievement in elementary school. In a longitudinal study of a diverse sample of 44 preschool children, we examined the extent to which their understanding of the cardinal meanings of the number words (e.g., knowing that the word "four" refers to sets with 4 items) is predicted by the "number talk" they hear from their primary caregiver in the early home environment. Results from 5 visits showed substantial variation in parents' number talk to children between the ages of 14 and 30 months. Moreover, this variation predicted children's knowledge of the cardinal meanings of number words at 46 months, even when socioeconomic status and other measures of parent and child talk were controlled. These findings suggest that encouraging parents to talk about number with their toddlers, and providing them with effective ways to do so, may positively impact children's school achievement.

Children's understanding of cancer and views on health-related behaviour: a ‘draw and write’ study

Few studies have explored young children's understanding of cancer and health-related behaviours yet this is essential to develop health promotion initiatives that build on young children's current knowledge levels and awareness. An exploratory descriptive design using the 'draw and write' technique was used to investigate children's views of cancer and health behaviours. The sample included 195 children aged eight to 11 years from five schools in deprived, affluent and rural locations in Scotland. When asked about cancer children demonstrated a good level of awareness by responding with text and drawings about the what they understood cancer to be; types of cancer; causes of cancer; what happens to people who have cancer; their personal experience of cancer and the emotions they associated with cancer. Older children, and children attending affluent schools, have more defined ideas about the causes of cancer and awareness of broader issues such as the risk of passive smoking or the potential impact on the family. Factors such as alcohol and illegal drugs were only reported by children attending schools in deprived locations. Children demonstrated considerable knowledge about healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviours; however, it is not clear whether this knowledge translates into their behaviours or the choices offered within their home environment. Children view cancer in a negative way from an early age, even without personal experience. There is a need to demystify cancer in terms of its causes, how to recognize it, how it is treated and to publicize improved survival rates. There is a need for targeted and developmentally appropriate approaches to be taken to health education in schools, with an awareness of the influence of the media on children's information. Strategies should take into consideration the socio-economic and cultural contexts of children's lives which influence their choices and behaviours.

Children's beliefs about the fantasy/reality status of hypothesized machines

Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were asked to make judgments about the reality status of four different types of machines: real machines that children and adults interact with on a daily basis, real machines that children and adults interact with rarely (if at all), and impossible machines that violated a real-world physical or biological causal law. Adults generally categorized all of the machines accurately. Both groups of children categorized familiar possible machines as real, but were agnostic as to the fantasy status of unfamiliar possible machines. Children generally responded that both kinds of impossible machines were make-believe, but 4-year-olds were more likely to make these accurate judgments for the physical than biological items, different from the older children and adults (whose responses were similar). These data suggest that children's judgments about the possibility of machines are not strictly limited by first-hand experience. Young children's domain-specific causal knowledge interacts with their understanding of the fantasy/reality distinction to constrain their inferences in a rational way.

A Model of Knower‐Level Behavior in Number Concept Development

We develop and evaluate a model of behavior on the Give-N task, a commonly-used measure of young children's number knowledge. Our model uses the knower-level theory of how children represent numbers. To produce behavior on the Give-N task, the model assumes children start out with a base-rate that make some answers more likely a priori than others, but is updated on each experimental trial in a way that depends on the interaction between the experimenter's request and the child's knower-level. We formalize this process as a generative graphical model, so that the parameters-including the base-rate distribution and each child's knower-level-can be inferred from data using Bayesian methods. Using this approach, we evaluate the model on previously published data from 82 children spanning the whole developmental range. The model provides an excellent fit to these data, and the inferences about the base-rate and knower-levels are interpretable and insightful. We discuss how our modeling approach can be extended to other developmental tasks, and can be used to help evaluate alternative theories of number representation against the knower-level theory.

From ‘Marginality’ to ‘Mainstream’: A Narrative of Early Childhood Professionalism in Bangladesh

Early childhood as a professional field with its concern for the young child has gained a distinctive perspective in Bangladesh. The prevailing thoughts and practices of this field, derived from a modern scientific paradigm, are a continuation of the trend that was introduced through colonization. The prime concern of practitioners is that children are marginal, therefore they need to be placed in the mainstream. Then, it is claimed, children will become the holders of rights, privileged and affluent. This article argues that this approach does not reveal knowledge of young children's situation ‘as it really is’. Rather, it provides twisted understandings of young children. Drawing on a postmodern perspective, the article proposes an alternative paradigm of efficient professionalism that is respectful of ‘little narratives' — local voices, diversity and the child's perspective — which is appropriate to the Bangladesh context and embraces openness. In order to make professional practices decolonized, this paradigm dismantles the colonial trend, challenges the professional approach's claim to be a transcendent form of knowledge and initiates the trend of understanding children in terms of their own circumstances.

Sensitivity to Growth Over Time of the Preschool Numeracy Indicators With a Sample of Preschoolers in Head Start

.There has been increased attention to the development of measures for assessing mathematical skill and knowledge in young children. Most of the evidence supporting these measures is consistent with Stage 1 research in the development of progress monitoring measures (Fuchs, 2004) and consists of investigation of technical features of performance at one point in time. The purpose of the current study was to move into Stage 2 research and examine sensitivity to growth over time of the Preschool Numeracy Indicators (PNIs; Floyd, Hojnoski, & Key, 2006) in a sample of Head Start preschoolers through a longitudinal design. Results indicated the PNI Oral Counting Fluency, One-to-One Correspondence Counting Fluency, Number Naming Fluency, and Quantity Comparison Fluency task scores are sensitive to growth over time and provide preliminary support for the promise of such measures in assessing early mathematical skill development. Consideration is given to implications for assessing early mathematical skill development in the context of general outcome measurement.

Interactive Writing as Informed Assessment with Highly Capable Young Children

Assessment of young children's literate knowledge and understandings is one of the most controversial issues in early childhood education. Parents, teachers, administrators, researchers, and policy makers often engage in impassioned debates about the purposes, forms, and interpretations involved in assessment practices (Salinger, 2001). I do not wish to add to those debates. Recommended guidelines for the assessment of highly capable young children call for the use of multiple measures (National Association of Gifted Children, 2006), and so my intention here is to explicate an approach to early literacy assessment that allows teachers to document the literate knowledge, behaviors, and performances of highly capable young children within the context of an authentic reading and writing event. I describe the approach as a type of informed assessment (Johnston &amp; Rogers, 2001), because through their participation, children reveal a great deal about their literate understandings, thus informing their teacher as to what they know and can do—as well as to what they still need to know. Informed assessment is especially useful in early childhood education, because it allows teachers to organize subsequent instructional activities so as to optimize children's literacy learning (see Chamberlain, Buchanan, &amp; Vercimak, 2007). In this article, I argue that interactive writing (McCarrier, Pinnell, &amp; Fountas, 2000)—an innovative approach to beginning writing instruction—can also become a powerful tool for informed assessment of children's early literacy development. I begin the paper by defining and explaining the potential of informed assessment in early literacy. Then, I describe interactive writing as an instructional approach. For each component of the lesson, I suggest various ways in which teachers can use interactive writing to document the literacy development of highly capable young children. My goal is to make a case for interactive writing as a preferred approach to both early literacy instruction and assessment.

Young children's knowledge about the influence of thoughts on emotions in rule situations

Four-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults (N = 48) listened to stories featuring characters that experienced one of four types of thoughts after deciding to transgress or comply with a rule: thoughts about desires, rules, future negative outcomes, or future punishment. Participants predicted and explained the characters' emotions. Results showed that young children, as with adults, predicted positive emotions for willpower and negative emotions for transgression at low rates for the think-desire trials, and at high rates for the think-rule and think-future trials. They also modified their emotion explanations in line with the focus of characters' thoughts. These data provide unprecedented evidence that young children can reason flexibly about emotions in rule situations when provided explicit, salient information about people's thoughts.

Promoting Broad and Stable Improvements in Low‐Income Children’s Numerical Knowledge Through Playing Number Board Games

Theoretical analyses of the development of numerical representations suggest that playing linear number board games should enhance young children's numerical knowledge. Consistent with this prediction, playing such a game for roughly 1 hr increased low-income preschoolers' (mean age = 5.4 years) proficiency on 4 diverse numerical tasks: numerical magnitude comparison, number line estimation, counting, and numeral identification. The gains remained 9 weeks later. Classmates who played an identical game, except for the squares varying in color rather than number, did not improve on any measure. Also as predicted, home experience playing number board games correlated positively with numerical knowledge. Thus, playing number board games with children from low-income backgrounds may increase their numerical knowledge at the outset of school.

Young Children’s Knowledge About Printed Names

Four experiments examined young children's knowledge about the visual characteristics of writing, specifically personal names. Children younger than 4 years of age, even those who could read no simple words, showed some knowledge about the horizontal orientation of English names, the Latin letters that make them up, and their left-to-right directionality. Preschoolers also had some familiarity with the shapes of the letters in their own first name, especially the leftmost letter. Knowledge of the conventional capitalization pattern for English names emerged later, after a period during which children preferred names in all uppercase letters. When tested with personal names, the kind of word they know best, young children are surprisingly knowledgeable about the visual characteristics of writing.

Childhood sexuality and rights in the context of HIV/AIDS

The primary objective in this study was to explore what HIV and AIDS mean to seven‐ and eight‐year‐old children in South Africa and how sexual and gender dynamics are embedded within these meanings. Against representations that associate young children with innocence, the paper argues for a more capacious view of young children as sexual and gendered agents with the ability to exercise their rights. In contrast to research that addresses children as relatively passive desexualised beings, focusing on their dependence on adults, their innocence and their need for protection, this paper examines how HIV and AIDS are constructed and negotiated by young people. It views children not simply in terms of their need for sexual rights but as potentially active participants in the negotiation of their rights. Viewing children's rights as highly contested, the notion that young children have sexual rights opens up possibilities for children (including those from marginalised groups) to talk about their concerns and pleasures, fears and hopes, as well as issues relating to sexual rights and resistances. By working creatively with teachers, it may be possible to broaden young children's knowledge of HIV and AIDS and sexuality within a more supportive environment.

Character Trait Vocabulary: A Schoolwide Approach

Research has documented the large differences in young children's vocabulary knowledge. In light of the strong relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, this gap is particularly worrisome and points to the critical need for well‐articulated vocabulary instruction across the grades.The author describes character trait vocabulary, in which the teacher asks students to describe the traits of characters in their reading. The children share their thinking and the teacher lists the terms offered for each character and prompts the children to explain their responses. After the children have analyzed the characters, the teacher displays a grid with a set of new terms chosen specifically for the characters under discussion. In a schoolwide approach to the practice, the teacher consciously tries to incorporate terms from the provided grade‐level list. The teacher introduces a word at a time, providing a brief child‐friendly definition and example, and asks the students to consider whether the term would apply to each of the characters.

A Systematic Review for the Effects of Television Viewing by Infants and Preschoolers

The purpose of this work was to conduct a systematic review of experimental trials for the effects of television viewing by infants and preschoolers. Searches were conducted as of January 2005 on several online bibliographic databases for the disciplines of medicine, psychology, education, and communications. Relevant bibliographies were also reviewed. The article contents were critically evaluated to determine whether they met inclusion criteria. Data were extracted from each included article regarding study methods and results. Twelve controlled trials met all of the criteria for inclusion in this review. All of the studies focused on the effect of television content rather than viewing time. The findings suggest that educational television programs are successful in broadening young children's knowledge, affecting their racial attitudes, and increasing their imaginativeness. There is insufficient experimental evidence for effects of viewing these programs on either children's prosocial behavior or their aggressive behavior. Finally, there is some evidence that viewing cartoons has a negative effect on children's attentional abilities. A number of gaps remain in the literature. Although the amount of time children spend viewing television raises concern, the studies presented here focus only on content. Despite the fact that infants are the fastest growing television market segment, the controlled trials only include children aged > or = 3 years. Finally, the clinical utility of the findings are questionable given that most studies included small group sizes, all took place in nonnaturalistic settings, and all but 1 study only evaluated short-term effects of television viewing.