Young Children's Understanding Research Articles

Mathe-Didactical Reflections on Young Children's Understanding and Application of Subtraction-Related Principles

In this article we react to the studies in this special issue of Mathematical Thinking and Learning on young children's understanding and application of subtraction-related principles. We discuss the results of these studies and the problems presented to the children from a mathe-didactical point of view; including both the perspective of the mathematical content and of its learning and teaching. The importance of this special issue is that it brings together psychologically and didactically oriented research.

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 & 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, & Vercimak, 2007). In this article, I argue that interactive writing (McCarrier, Pinnell, & 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 understanding of ongoing vs. completion in imperfective and perfective participles

This article investigates how English-speaking children interpret imperfective and perfective participles used attributively in a prenominal position, as in 'burning/burned candle'. These participles exhibit a pure aspectual distinction between ongoing and completion that is independent of the temporal entailments contributed by a finite verb. This article reports results from 45 children (1;6-6;8) who participated in an experiment investigating whether they know that the two types of adjectival participles are used to pick out different situations; namely, the imperfective participles map onto ongoing events and the perfective participles map onto completed events (Klein 2004). We found that the elimination of the tense-aspect interaction resulted in an improved results compared to those in Wagner (2002). However, the results in this article as well as those from Wagner's (2002) study of grammatical aspect morphology both find that children do not master the aspectual distinction before around age 5 when object-related information is given ― in the absence of agency cues.

The effect of a music education program featuring the integration of movement, pictures, and language on young children's musical understanding and interest

The effect of a music education program featuring the integration of movement, pictures, and language on young children's musical understanding and interest

Storytime: young children's literary understanding in the classroom

The author draws on his own extensive research in urban classrooms to present a grounded theoretical model of young children's understanding of picture storybooks. Advancing a much broader and deeper theory of literary understanding, the author suggests that children respond in five different ways during picture storybook readalounds; that these responses reveal that children are engaged in five different types of literary meaning-making; and that these five types of meaning-making are instantiations of five foundational aspects of literary understanding.Capturing the liveliness of children's responses, this dynamic volume: describes picture storybooks as sophisticated aesthetic objects worthy of children's literary critical abilities; offers a theory of literary understanding that is relevant to contemporary young children from a wide variety of ethnic, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds; includes a wealth of examples of children's responses and how teachers' scaffolded the children's interpretation of stories; and, examines the significance of young children's literary interpretation, factors that influence literary understanding, and implications for practice and further research.

‘If there's a dead rat, don't leave it’. Young children's understanding of their citizenship rights and responsibilities

Concerns about pupil disengagement from school and society have led to compulsory citizenship education in state schools in England. However, there is little evidence that the new citizenship education is meeting its goals. The research described here assesses a new approach to citizenship education that appears to overcome some of the identified obstacles in current practices. Hampshire's ‘Rights, respect and responsibility’ initiative is a rights‐based whole school reform of school policies and practices. Under this initiative the contemporaneous citizenship status of pupils is respected, pupils are taught about their rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and democratic participation is made meaningful in classroom and school functioning. Of particular interest is that the initiative starts in infant schools. This research indicates that young children can understand their rights and responsibilities in ways that are meaningful to their everyday behaviour and that rights‐based whole school reform has the capacity to improve pupil learning and citizenship behaviours.

Preventing Early Mathematics Difficulties: The Feasibility of a Rigorous Kindergarten Mathematics Curriculum

Concern about poor mathematics achievement in U.S. schools has increased in recent years. In part, poor achievement may be attributed to a lack of attention to early instruction and missed opportunities to build on young children's early understanding of mathematics. This study examined the development and feasibility testing of a kindergarten mathematics curriculum designed to focus on the development of early number sense, geometry, measurement, and mathematics vocabulary. A mixed-model analysis of covariance, using pretest score as a covariate, was used to determine the effect of the experimental curriculum on student achievement on a standardized measure of early mathematics. Achievement results as well as implementation fidelity and teacher satisfaction suggest that further empirical research on the efficacy of the curriculum is warranted.

The Development of Moral Emotion Expectancies and the Happy Victimizer Phenomenon: A Critical Review of Theory and Application

The happy victimizer demarks a phenomenon in which there is a discrepancy between young children's understanding of moral rules and their attribution of positive emotions to wrong-doers. In this paper, we argue why developmental transitions in this aspect of emotion understanding have both theoretical and applied value. First, the research literature on moral emotion expectancies is critically reviewed and methodological constraints of the happy victimizer experimental paradigm are discussed. Second, we elaborate on the connections between moral emotion expectancies and children's understanding of human agency. It is argued that the coordination process involved in making moral emotion attributions and moral judgments is a key element in the evolving moral self. Third, the developmental significance of moral emotion expectancies for children's and adolescent's externalizing symptoms and adaptive behavior is discussed.

Supplemental Material for Taking Fiction Seriously: Young Children Understand the Normative Structure of Joint Pretence Games

Supplemental Material for Taking Fiction Seriously: Young Children Understand the Normative Structure of Joint Pretence Games

The Development of an Early Childhood Teacher Research Collaborative

This article investigates young children's understanding of and relationships to their communities and the natural world. Inspired by the pedagogy of Reggio Emilia (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998) and guided by the concept of documentation as a cycle of inquiry (Gandini & Goldhaber, 2001), a group of early childhood educators from across the state of Vermont met regularly to share and analyze observations, artifacts, photographs, and videotapes of children in their communities and the natural world. These discussions generated additional experiences that promoted the children's thinking and theories and resulted in participants reflecting on what they had learned about children in their communities and the natural world by creating an exhibit that would travel throughout Vermont. The article discusses a process teachers can engage in to study, deepen, and ultimately celebrate children's engagement in their communities and the natural world.

The Development of an Early Childhood Teacher Research Collaborative

Abstract This article investigates young children's understanding of and relationships to their communities and the natural world. Inspired by the pedagogy of Reggio Emilia (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998 Edwards, C., Gandini, L. and Forman, G., eds. 1998. The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia approach — Advanced reflections,, 2nd ed, Greenwich, CT: Ablex. [Google Scholar]) and guided by the concept of documentation as a cycle of inquiry (Gandini & Goldhaber, 2001 Gandini, L. and Goldhaber, J. 2001. “Two reflections about documentation”. In Bambini: The Italian approach to infant/toddler care, Edited by: Gandini, L. and Edwards, C. 124–145. New York: Teachers College Press. [Google Scholar]), a group of early childhood educators from across the state of Vermont met regularly to share and analyze observations, artifacts, photographs, and videotapes of children in their communities and the natural world. These discussions generated additional experiences that promoted the children's thinking and theories and resulted in participants reflecting on what they had learned about children in their communities and the natural world by creating an exhibit that would travel throughout Vermont. The article discusses a process teachers can engage in to study, deepen, and ultimately celebrate children's engagement in their communities and the natural world.

Young children's understanding of multiple object identity: appearance, pretense and function

Evidence from theory-of-mind tasks suggests that young children have substantial difficulty thinking about multiple object identity and multiple versions of reality. On the other hand, evidence from children's understanding of pretense indicates that children have little trouble understanding dual object identity and counterfactual scenarios that are involved in pretend play. Two studies reported here show that this competence is not limited to pretend play. Three-year-olds also understand the dual identity involved in unusual functional use (X is being used as Y), even though they have difficulty understanding deceptive appearance (X looks like Y). We suggest that children are able to distinguish extrinsic object properties from intrinsic ones (function vs. category-membership) better than they can distinguish superficial object properties from deep ones (appearance vs. category-membership).

Getting to the root: young writers' sensitivity to the role of root morphemes in the spelling of inflected and derived words

The English orthography is morphophonemic: spellings encode both morphemes and phonemes. Questions of the starting point and extent of young children's understanding of the link between morphemes and spelling are important for theories of spelling development. We conducted two experiments to address these issues. In Experiment 1, 65 six- to eight-year-old English-speaking children spelled just the first sections of inflected, derived and control words. Their spelling of these first segments was better in inflected and derived words than in control words. The findings were replicated in Experiment 2 with 78 six- to eight-year-old children spelling a greater number of items. These two studies converge on the conclusion that, in specific testing situations, six- to eight-year-old children appreciate the role of root morphemes in the spelling of both inflected and derived words. These results are discussed in relation to current models of spelling development.

What do Five-Year-Olds Know of the World? — Geographical Understanding and Play in Young Children's Early Learning

ABSTRACTYoung children bring a wide variety of developing geographical experience with them when they enter primary school. This article outlines various aspects of the nature, variety and extent of young children's geographical awareness, skills, knowledge, understanding, attitudes and values. It identifies children's environmental knowledge, the opportunities in, and limits to, their local and more travelled experience, concerns that inhibit greater freedom of movement and the role of play experience in their environmental learning. Children's spatial capabilities are examined and the distinction between using and making representations in and of the environment noted. This is linked, through reference to geographical aspects of the Foundation Stage curriculum in England, to the opportunities for geographically focused play that should be available to children in the early years of schooling. Several aspects of young children's play and its contexts are addressed to show how it can be used to encourage geographical experience and learning. The article concludes by noting that geographical learning should be referred to directly, and suggests relevant additions to the early curriculum requirements.

The Development of Future Time Concepts Through Mother-Child Conversation

This study examined the relationship between characteristics of mothers' talk about future events and young children's ability to contribute to naturalistic con- versations about future events. Results indicated that three maternal style factors were related to 2.5- and 4-year-olds' contributions: elaborative/advanced lan- guage, general and past reference, and repetitive prompts and preferences. Younger children's contributions were related to elaborative/advanced lan- guage and general and past reference factors. Older children's contributions were correlated with all three factors, but the highest correlation was found for elaborative/advanced language. These findings indicate that the maternal style variables affecting children's contributions to conversations about future events are different from those found in research on mother-child talk about past events. Mothers' use of conventional time terms was also related to 4-year-olds' production of temporal terms, suggesting that maternal time references con- tribute to children's understanding and use of temporal terminology. Results are discussed in terms of the relationship between mother-child conversations about future events and the development of young children's understanding of future time.

Looking at the complexity of two young children's understanding of number

This paper presents a qualitative study that investigated two third-grade students’ understanding of number. The children were videotaped while they worked to record everything they knew about the number, 72. Their artifacts and conversations were then analyzed using the Pirie–Kieren dynamical theory for the growth of mathematical understanding as the theoretical framework. The results of the video analysis revealed the two students’ understanding of natural numbers as being conceptually complex and existing in several different realms of the Pirie–Kieren model. Significant instances of Primitive Knowing, Image Making, Image Having, Property Noticing, Formalizing, Observing, as well as how the children's understanding existed beyond “Don’t Need” Boundaries are identified and examined in detail. Other features of the model — Structuring, Inventising, Folding Back, and Connected Understanding – are also explained and possible examples illustrating these kinds of mathematical thinking in relation to the two children's understanding of number are offered.

How fantasy benefits young children's understanding of pretense

Sobel and Lillard (2001) demonstrated that 4-year-olds' understanding of the role that the mind plays in pretending improved when children were asked questions in a fantasy context. The present study investigated whether this fantasy effect was motivated by children recognizing that fantasy contains violations of real-world causal structure. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were shown a fantasy character engaged in ordinary actions or actions that violated causal knowledge. Children were more likely to say that a troll doll who was acting like but ignorant of the character was not pretending to be that character when read the violation story. Experiment 2 suggested that this difference was not caused by a greater interest in the violation story. Experiment 3 demonstrated a similar difference for characters engaged in social and functional violations that were possible in the real world. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that preschoolers use actions and appearance more than mental states to make judgments about pretense, but that those judgments can be influenced by the context in which the questions are presented.

Young children's understanding of death

There is a long history of research on children's understanding of death. This article briefly reviews psychoanalytic and Piagetian literature on children's death concepts, then focuses on recent research in developmental psychology that examines children's understanding of death in the context of their developing folk theory of biology. This new research demonstrates that children first conceptualise death as a biological event around age 5 or 6 years, at the same time that they begin to construct a biological model of how the human body functions to maintain “life”. This detailed new account of children's developing biological knowledge has implications for practitioners who may be called on to communicate about death with young children.

Young children's understandings of cigarette smoking

We explore young children's attitudes toward, beliefs about, and life-style associations with cigarette smoking using direct and indirect measures. Second (n = 100) and fifth grade (n = 141) elementary school students (i.e. 7-8 and 10-11-year-olds) were excused from class and individually interviewed. Participants selected pictures in response to the questions: who would like to smoke cigarettes the most and who would like to smoke cigarettes the least? Their picture choices were probed using open-ended prompts designed to elicit the beliefs and life-style associations underlying their choices. Survey-based measures of attitudes and beliefs were also collected. Second graders reported life-style associations with cigarette smoking that were consistent with those of fifth graders. While their associations with smoking are generally negative, children appear to perceive that others feel that smoking makes them look cool and feel cool and also helps them to fit in. By fifth grade, many children believe that smoking can help to reduce stress and alleviate negative mood states. The presence of a smoker in the household does not appear to affect these associations, suggesting that they may be being shaped by external socialization agents. Young children appear to be developing understandings of cigarette smoking that go beyond knowing that cigarettes are products that are smoked. As some of their perceptions appear likely to predispose them for future experimentation, young children need to be included in prevention research so that age-appropriate interventions can be developed.

Informed assent: ethics and processes when researching with young children

This paper presents the initial findings of an ongoing research project conducted at the International Centre for Early Childhood in Singapore. The researchers have been collaborating with a group of student teachers who conduct research with young children in early childhood settings, for the purpose of assignment requirements. Prior to any research being carried out, a requirement of the institution is that informed assent is obtained from the children. This has raised issues of presumption of young children's understandings of the research process, images held of young children in an Asian context, and children's right to be part of a decision‐making process. The initial findings will impact on the way that researchers in general must approach the inclusion of young children in participatory research.