Young Children's Understanding Research Articles

Technology and geometry: Fostering young children's geometrical concepts through a research-based robotic coding program

AbstractGeometric concepts are fundamental to early geometry education, and developmentally appropriate practices are crucial for teaching them to young children. Robotic coding is an effective tool in many areas of early mathematics and has significant potential in teaching geometric concepts. This study aimed to test the impact of a research-based robotic coding program on young children's understanding of geometric concepts. A quasi-experimental design was used with two intervention groups. The study involved 52 5-year-old children from a public kindergarten. The intervention-1 group (n = 18) received a research-based robotic coding program, while the intervention-2 group (n = 16) received a research-based no-coding program. The non-intervention group (n = 18) attended their regular program. Data on participants' understanding of geometrical concepts was collected through individual interviews using a geometric shapes classification test. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was utilized to assess the effectiveness of two interventions. The results showed that both interventions had a significant effect with the robotic program being more effective. Additionally, follow-up tests indicated that both interventions had a lasting effect on the children's understanding of geometrical concepts. The study highlighted the potential of incorporating robotic coding and relevant research in fostering young children's geometrical development.

Mapping skills between symbols and quantities in preschoolers: The role of finger patterns.

Mapping skills between different codes to represent numerical information, such as number symbols (i.e., verbal number words and written digits) and non-symbolic quantities, are important in the development of the concept of number. The aim of the current study is to investigate children's mapping skills by incorporating another numerical code that emerges at early stages in development, finger patterns. Specifically, the study investigates (i) the order in which mapping skills develop and the association with young children's understanding of cardinality; and (ii) whether finger patterns are processed similarly to symbolic codes or rather as non-symbolic quantities. Preschool children (3-year-olds, N=113, Mage=40.8months, SDage=3.6months; 4-year-olds, N=103, Mage=52.9months, SDage=3.4months) both cardinality knowers and subset-knowers, were presented with twelve tasks that assessed the mappings between number words, Arabic digits, finger patterns, and quantities. The results showed that children's ability to map symbolic numbers precedes the understanding that such symbols reflect quantities, and that children recognize finger patterns above their cardinality knowledge, suggesting that finger patterns are symbolic in essence. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children are more accurate in mapping between finger patterns and symbols (number words and Arabic digits) than in mapping finger patterns and quantities, indicating that fingers are processed holistically as symbolic codes. Children can map finger patterns to symbols above their corresponding cardinality level even in subset-knowers. Finger patterns may play a role in the process by which children learn to map symbols to quantities. Fingers patterns' use in the classroom context may be an adequate instructional and diagnostic tool.

"Mom Said after the Spring Festival, I've Grown a Year": Chinese Preschoolers' Perspectives on Growing Up.

Previous studies on child development have emphasized universal developmental stages and socialization, overlooking a direct investigation of young children's subjective understanding of growing up. This study explored the perspectives of preschool children on growing up. Participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and drawing-telling were employed to investigate 56 urban Chinese preschoolers. The theoretical framework adopted for this study was Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology, providing a lens through which the children's voices were elucidated. The results revealed that children perceive their growth holistically across four themes: body, space, skills, and relations. Their perception of growing up adheres to a structure-agency duality, where social influences and children's agency coalesce to shape their understanding of growing up. Adults contribute by embedding significance in daily situations and designated "occupations", while children actively reinterpret these societal narratives, forging their conceptions of growing up. These findings suggest a need for educational approaches that resonate with children's interpretations of their evolving lifeworld beyond merely imparting knowledge.

Learning Video Media Using Dynamic Drawing Principles for Vocabulary Recognition to Improve Early Childhood Speaking Comprehension

There are obstacles to low student learning outcomes. This is caused by teachers who only use the lecture method in the learning process, which results in students not playing an active role in the learning process. This research aims to create learning video media using the principle of dynamic drawing for vocabulary introduction to improve speaking comprehension for young children in group B kindergarten. The media development process follows ADDIE procedures. The data collection method uses a questionnaire, while the instrument uses a rating scale of 1-5. Data analysis was carried out using descriptive statistical methods and quantitative descriptive statistics to describe the average scores from experts regarding the learning video media being developed. The research results show that this learning video passed the validity and practicality tests well, with a "very good" assessment from media experts, material experts, teachers, and students. Thus, this learning video based on dynamic drawing principles is effective in increasing young children's understanding of storytelling, making a positive contribution in the context of multicultural education, and has the potential to become a reference for developing similar products in the future. This research implies that dynamic drawing-based learning video media has great potential to support early childhood learning, especially in understanding animal vocabulary.

The Use of SKIDU (Sex Kids Education) Game as an Effort to Introduce Sex Education in Early Childhood

The introduction of sex education is an urgency that needs to be given to children from an early age to prevent the widespread phenomenon of sexual violence that occurs in Indonesia. In addition, children's lack of understanding about sexual harassment and the dangers surrounding it makes children remain silent when abused. This research aims to analyze the influence of the SKIDU (Sex Kids Education) game as an effort to introduce sex education to children aged 5-6 years. This type of research is quantitative research. This research uses a pre-experimental method with a one-group pretest-posttest design without a control class. The sample in this study was ten children aged 5-6 years. Data collection is obtained from observation and documentation. The data collection instrument uses a questionnaire sheet. The data analysis technique uses hypothesis testing (paired sample t-test). The results obtained were differences before and after being given treatment using the SKIDU (Sex Kids Education) game. The SKIDU (Sex Kids Education) game influences introducing sex education to children aged 5-6 years. It was concluded that the use of the SKIDU (Sex Kids Education) game can increase children's knowledge about sex education. The implication of this research is that the SKIDU game can increase young children's understanding of body parts that other people should not touch.

Young children's perspectives of time: New directions for co‐constructing understandings of quality in ECEC

AbstractChildren's relationship with time in preschools is an under‐researched area. Young children rarely know how to measure time using a clock, but their experiences of time may contribute to understanding children's well‐being and debates about quality in preschools. This paper brings together two empirical exploratory studies conducted in preschools in Iceland and Croatia, respectively, and is based on participatory research methods that highlight young children's perspectives on their sense of time. First, the paper provides examples of young children's understanding of the sequence of events in preschools. Most days were marked by regular routines, such as mealtimes, circle time and outdoor activities. These stepping stones were seen as providing a rhythm for the day. Children's conversations and drawings indicated an embodied sense of time that is subjective, relational and situational. Second, questions have been raised about the impact of different time practices on young children's everyday lives in preschools. In some cases, the management of time appeared to have unintended consequences for factors relating to quality in preschools. Adherence to daily visual schedules could lead to fragmented days with fewer opportunities for uninterrupted play than time management based on ‘flow’. The subjective nature of children's sense of time is complex, and shared understandings between adults and children are not guaranteed. Careful and imaginative listening is required in order to deepen understandings on this topic. This could, in turn, support teachers to further consider the impact on children's daily experiences of preschool when planning based solely on ‘clock time’.

Should I stay or should I go? Three-year-olds' reactions to appropriate motives to interrupt a joint activity.

Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of understanding what cooperation entails. Philosophical analyses have suggested that we should release our partner from a joint activity anytime the activity conflicts with fulfilling a moral obligation. To probe young children's understanding of this aspect, we investigated whether 3-year-old children (N = 60) are sensitive to the legitimacy of motives (selfish condition vs. moral condition) leading agents to intentionally interrupt their joint activity. We measured whether children protested or released their partner by scoring their reactions. Our results indicate that children did not manifest different reactions when the motive behind their partner leaving was moral than when the motive was selfish. However, our data showed a stable pattern: regardless of the partner's motives, some 3-year-olds take initiatives to release their partners from joint activity, suggesting that measuring release is a valuable tool for investigating joint action.

Perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic as demonstrated in drawings of Swedish children aged 4-6 years.

To explore the perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, as expressed in the drawings of Swedish children aged 4-6 years. We analysed 91 drawings with associated descriptions submitted to the Swedish Archive of Children's Art from April 2020 to February 2021. The visual and text analysis resulted in three themes. First, illustrating the virus and embodying the danger showed that young children understood the invisible enemy, combining realistic elements of the virus particle with fantasies of the 'virus monster' that needs to be fought off. Second, life has changed for the worse describes the profound effect the pandemic had on young children's lives also in Sweden, with comparatively mild restrictions and no school closures. Third, the virus spreads across the world, affects people and infects their bodies conveys young children's understanding of the pandemic as an existential challenge affecting the whole world. Children displayed surprisingly high levels of health literacy related to COVID-19, including contagion routes and the importance of hand hygiene. The drawings of Swedish children aged 4-6 years demonstrated the profound, practical and emotional effects of the pandemic on their lives. Drawings also illuminated young children's level of health literacy regarding COVID-19.

Can a robot lie? Young children's understanding of intentionality beneath false statements

AbstractIncluding robots in children's lives calls for reflection on the psychological and moral aspects of such relationships, especially with respect to children's ability to differentiate intentional from unintentional false statements, that is, lies from mistakes. This ability calls for an understanding of an interlocutor's intentions. This study examined the ability of 5‐6‐year‐olds to recognize, and morally evaluate, lies and mistakes produced by a human as compared to a NAO robot, and to attribute relevant emotions to the deceived party. Irrespective of the agent, children had more difficulty in understanding mistakes than lies. In addition, they were disinclined to attribute a lie to the robot. Children's age and their understanding of intentionality were the strongest predictors of their performance on the lie‐mistake task. Children's Theory of Mind, but not their executive function skills, also correlated with their performance. Our findings suggest that, regardless of age, a robot is perceived as an intentional agent. Robot behaviour was more acceptable for children because his actions could be attributed to someone who programmed it to act in a specific way.Highlights The ability to recognize an intention to lie or not in different agents represents a significant developmental step. Children saw a human/robot making intentionally or unintentionally false statements, and understanding the mistake was more difficult than the lie. Robots may be associated with the human concept by younger children with important implications for use of cHRI in education.

A Review of 'A Gender Flexible Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education'

Gender is an important feature that people use to analyse social stimuli, children start to form gender stereotypes as early as the preschool education. It is noteworthy that contemporary early childhood education is usually driven by child-centred values that does not address the significance of gender issues for young children. Nevertheless, Aina and Cameron discover that stereotypes might be harmful to children's physical and emotional well-being. Accordingly, it is controversial about the degree to which preschool teachers could implement teaching methods to eliminate these gender stereotypes and improve young children's understanding of gender. An article by Jo Warin and Vina Adriany, 'A gender-flexible pedagogy in early childhood education', gives a detailed investigation in this area. This review will examine the article from five perspectives, including purpose, argument, theoretical concepts, and methodology, and followed by a reflection.

Early strengths in science: Young children's conversations about nature in Latine families

Young children's science understanding begins in everyday observations and conversations with their parents. While research on STEM learning in Latine children often suggests deficits, we used diary report methods to identify conversations as indicators of 3–5-year-old children's early strengths in science. Twenty-one Latine families from coastal California, with parent schooling averaging 9 years (range 0–16), reported family conversations about nature for 2 weeks. Families reported on average 6.95 conversations (range 1–14). Frequent topics were animals (26%), plants (21%), weather (17%), and astronomy (16%). Partial correlations (controlling for age and parent schooling) revealed that children's question-initiated conversations correlated with families' science-related home activities, and conversations about animals and astronomy. Three case studies illustrate rich conversations where children and parents engaged in science practices during everyday talk. Our study provides evidence of Latine children's early interest in a broad array of science topics and their parents' support of their interests.

Young children infer psychological ownership from stewardship.

Although people take care of their own possessions, they also engage in stewardship and take care of things they do not own. Here, we examined what young children infer when they observe stewardship behavior of an object. Through four experiments on predominantly middle-class Canadian children (total N = 350, 168 girls and 182 boys from a predominantly White and middle-class region), we found that children as young as 4 or 5 infer feelings of ownership from stewardship behaviors and distinguish between psychological and legal ownership. They also understand that psychological and legal ownership are independent as one can exist without the other, and children as young as 3 may link stewardship with welfare concerns. We also suggest that while stewardship has been shown to be a consequence of psychological ownership, it is also likely to be an antecedent. As future stewards of our resources, young children's understanding of the link between psychological ownership and stewardship links directly to sustainability concerns. We contribute theoretically both to the child development and psychological ownership literatures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Development of children's informal understanding of division through sharing: Contributions of reasoning demands and problem situations

This study examined the longitudinal development of young children's informal understanding of division through fair sharing. Two hundred and twelve children were followed from the age of 4.5–5.5 over three waves of assessment. Division understanding was measured with different types of problems (same- versus different-divisor trials) presented with different situations (partitive vs quotitve). Several key findings emerged. First, different-divisor problems were significantly more difficult than same-divisor problems at all age levels, which suggests that tasks that demand children's understanding of the inverse relation between divisor and quotient are more difficult than tasks that demand the understanding of equivalence principle. Second, children found it easier to understand the inverse relation between divisor and quotient in the context of partitive than quotitive situation. Third, with age, there was a sharper improvement in solving different-divisor problems than same-divisor problems, whereas the progress was more prominent for different-divisor problems presented in partitive situations, compared with other problems. Finally, working memory made the most consistent and unique contribution to solving all kinds of division problems at all age levels, compared with other cognitive factors. Theoretical and practical implications in early childhood mathematics education are discussed.

Growth in emotion understanding across early childhood: A cohort-sequential model of firstborn children across the transition to siblinghood.

Emotion understanding develops rapidly in early childhood. Firstborn children (N=231, 55% girls/45% boys, 86% White, 5% Black, 3% Asian, 4% Latinx, Mage =29.92months) were recruited into a longitudinal study from 2004 to 2008 in the United States and administered a series of tasks assessing eight components of young children's emotion understanding from ages 1 to 5. Cohort sequential analysis across three cohorts (1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds) demonstrated a progression of children's emotion understanding from basic emotion identification to an understanding of false-belief emotions, even after controlling for children's verbal ability. Emotion understanding scores were related to children's theory of mind and parent reports of empathy, but not emotional reactivity, providing evidence of both convergent and discriminant validity.

Associations among child temperament, parenting, and young children's moral and conventional understanding: The moderating role of self‐regulation

AbstractThe current study examined the role of child temperament, parenting, and their interactions in 2‐ to 6‐year‐olds’ (n = 112; Mage = 3.82 years, SD = 1.01) moral and social‐conventional understanding. Children's judgments regarding hypothetical moral and conventional transgressions were assessed in a semi‐structured interview administered on an iPad. Parents reported on their child's temperamental self‐regulation (i.e., effortful control) and negative affect, as well as their own parenting practices (hostility and positive affect); children's self‐regulatory behavior was assessed during a snack delay task. Parent‐rated child effortful control was associated with greater distinctions between moral and conventional judgments, as estimated using latent difference score modeling, but only when parents were high in positive affect. Parental hostility was associated negatively with moral‐conventional domain distinctions, but only for children with poorer behavioral self‐regulation. Finally, children high in negative affect differentiated moral and social‐conventional transgressions more only when they were rated as high in effortful control by parents. The results demonstrated that an interplay between child temperament and parenting was associated with the development of young children's moral and social‐conventional understanding.

Audiovisual Speech Processing in Relationship to Phonological and Vocabulary Skills in First Graders.

It is generally accepted that adults use visual cues to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments, but findings regarding visual speech benefit in children are mixed. We explored factors that contribute to audiovisual (AV) gain in young children's speech understanding. We examined whether there is an AV benefit to speech-in-noise recognition in children in first grade and if visual salience of phonemes influences their AV benefit. We explored if individual differences in AV speech enhancement could be explained by vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, or general psychophysical testing performance. Thirty-seven first graders completed online psychophysical experiments. We used an online single-interval, four-alternative forced-choice picture-pointing task with age-appropriate consonant-vowel-consonant words to measure auditory-only, visual-only, and AV word recognition in noise at -2 and -8 dB SNR. We obtained standard measures of vocabulary and phonological awareness and included a general psychophysical test to examine correlations with AV benefits. We observed a significant overall AV gain among children in first grade. This effect was mainly attributed to the benefit at -8 dB SNR, for visually distinct targets. Individual differences were not explained by any of the child variables. Boys showed lower auditory-only performances, leading to significantly larger AV gains. This study shows AV benefit, of distinctive visual cues, to word recognition in challenging noisy conditions in first graders. The cognitive and linguistic constraints of the task may have minimized the impact of individual differences of vocabulary and phonological awareness on AV benefit. The gender difference should be studied on a larger sample and age range.

How Do Young Children Understand and Action their Own Well-Being? Positive Psychology, Student Voice, and Well-Being Literacy in Early Childhood

To help build early childhood mental health, an understanding of how young children comprehend and communicate about wellbeing (i.e., wellbeing literacy) is required; yet early childhood remains an understudied age group in positive psychology research. Grounded in the two fields of early childhood and positive psychology, this inductive qualitative study examined wellbeing literacy in five- and six-year-old children. Narrative analysis of children’s drawings and explanations of wellbeing were analyzed using a sample of children in their first year of school across two schools in Australia (n = 124 drawings, 53% girls and 47% boys). Results showed young children understand wellbeing to be an accessible and learnable state fostered through intra- and inter-individual factors. Children identified the importance of their emotions, actions, relationships, and environments in shaping wellbeing. Using research methods that access the voice of young children yields important insights about wellbeing literacy that can be used to inform the design of early childhood positive psychology interventions.

Young children's knowledge of fair sharing as an informal basis for understanding division: A latent profile analysis

This study examined patterns of individual differences in young children's early understanding of division. Two hundred and thirty-seven 5- and 6-year-old children completed division tasks that assessed their understanding of the direct and inverse relations in division in two different situations – partitive and quotitive. Two main results emerged from our latent profile analyses. First, all children who had good performance in the inverse-relation problems also performed well in the direct-relation problems, but the converse was not true. Second, all children who performed well in the inverse-relation problems in quotitive situations also performed well in the inverse-relation problems in partitive situations, but not vice versa. The findings highlight the importance of situations in determining children's success in recognizing the inverse relation in division. Several theoretical implications for the development of children's division concepts and educational implications for assessment and teaching are discussed.

Young children's understanding of other people's inferences

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Young Children's Understandings of Clocks at the Start of School

Time is an essential construct for understanding our everyday lives and the wider world; however, it is commonly seen as a difficult topic by teachers and children throughout primary school. There is limited research into children's learning about time, and in particular, concerning young children's understandings of clocks. This study examines the extent to which children are able to draw the structural features of a clock at the start of school. The drawings were produced by 132 Kindergarten children in their first six weeks of primary school. The drawings showed that the majority of the children started school with the ability to represent the structural features of a clock (numbers, hands, partitioning). Moreover, unlike previous studies, our analysis suggests that children's ability to represent clock structure does not progress sequentially. Rather, the drawings suggest that different children attend to different features of clocks, and thus have different developmental journeys.