Early Childhood Education Journal最新文献

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) constitutes a major policy reform for Australian people with disabilities. Despite its ten-year implementation, little is known about the characteristics of the workforce delivering Australia’s NDIS early childhood intervention services (ECI). The present study sought to identify the range of skills, knowledge, and experience of ECI professionals as listed in recruitment advertisements, and their alignment with best practice guidelines. Provider data were extracted from 246 advertisements for ECI roles over a 5-month period and assigned into various categories. Interrater reliability was determined by randomly selecting 65 of the 246 of the advertisements, which were coded independently by two researchers and assigned to service provider categories. Significant changes have occurred in the qualities of professionals providing ECI services under the NDIS, and their adherence to best practice guidelines. The limited emphasis on best practice in the recruitment process may result in an ECI workforce that is not well equipped to deliver specialised and inclusive support to young children with disabilities and their families.

In recent years, early childhood education for sustainability has received increasing attention. However, research on early childhood teachers in relation to this issue remains marginalized. Teachers’ environmental attitudes support children’s nature play and are strongly associated with sustainability. According to previous studies, environmental knowledge is important to pro-environmental attitudes. This article used a quantitative survey to explore the environmental attitudes of 832 early childhood in-service teachers and determined the relationship between their environmental knowledge and attitudes. The Two Major Environmental Values (2-MEV) scale was adopted to examine the environmental attitudes of the participants, including conservation and utilization. The outcomes showed that the participants had a more positive attitude toward environmental conservation and a less positive attitude toward environmental utilization. Although their environmental knowledge was relatively low, it significantly predicted their environmental attitudes toward both conservation and utilization, but the impacts were minimal. The 2-MEV scale cannot fully resolve controversies regarding the relationship between teachers’ environmental knowledge and attitudes. More attention should be given to other aspects of teachers’ jobs, such as job satisfaction and culture.

In Norway, children aged one to five years can attend subsidized and publicly regulated Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) centers. These centers focus on holistic child development through play, care, and learning. Therefore, Norway should be capable of providing young children with the best possible ECEC environment, thereby laying a solid foundation for their future school success. However, Norwegian 15-year-old students score at or below the average in mathematics, reading, and science compared to students in other OECD countries, and average scores are declining OECD (PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The state of learning and equity in education, 2023). Several factors may contribute to Norwegian students’ average or below-average school performance, e.g., pedagogical weaknesses that were present even before school, in ECEC. An OECD report from 2015 pointed out several challenges in the Norwegian ECEC quality (Early childhood education and care policy review Norway, 2015), related to factors such as structural standards, monitoring of process quality, lack of independence of inspections, lack of understanding regarding monitoring, and insufficient monitoring practices. In this paper, we present: (1) Norwegian policy initiatives implemented in response to the OECD report, and (2) Research conducted after the OECD report on the quality levels of Norwegian ECEC, along with findings from interventions designed to improve quality. Based on this, we discuss the progress since the 2015 OECD report and highlight continuing challenges and important next steps to secure high ECEC quality in Norway for all children. We find that several policy initiatives have been implemented but observed ECEC quality levels after the 2015 report are still in the medium to low range.

This study examined various formats and strategies used by caregivers in early reading activities, and assessed how they were tailored to the developmental stages of infants and toddlers. Participants included three caregivers from classrooms for ages 0–12, 13–18, and 19–24 months, and the director of an early childhood education center known for emphasizing early reading experiences. Data were collected from observations of reading activities and interviews with the four participants. The findings revealed that the caregivers intentionally organized reading activities in different formats— one-on-one, group, and free reading—each fulfilling distinct objectives and developmental needs. They employed various strategies, including contextualized linguistic, paralinguistic, social, and decontextualized linguistic approaches, which were all adapted to the children’s developmental levels and reading contexts. This study resulted in a scaffolding framework that informs reading practices in early childhood education centers, offering professional training recommendations and particularly highlighting the necessity of decontextualized talk beyond the book text.

This explorative qualitative study investigated how families engage in mealtime conversations supported with decorated plates that were specially designed to promote family conversations. Our aim was to examine the main thematic and discursive patterns that naturally occurred in these conversations. Six Norwegian families of pre-school children aged 3–6 years were provided with five decorated plates and asked to audio-record their conversations during a meal. Transcripts of the audio-recordings were analysed with manifest content-related analysis, followed by an abductive analysis and a mapping of the main discourse types and interactional patterns. We demonstrate that the conversations displayed great thematic heterogeneity and represented a continuum of extended and non-extended talk, ranging from basic labelling and vocabulary recall to narration, explanation and argumentation. Variable engagement levels among the participants were also noted. We argue that decorated tableware can serve as a valuable tool for studying linguistic input and the nature of adult–child conversations during mealtimes at home and beyond.

The early childhood period has lasting effects on physical and mental health. Most U.S. families rely on daily non-parental care for children under five, highlighting the importance of integrating family preferences with educator practices through reciprocal family engagement (RFE). Systems change initiatives are promising to promote RFE due to the potential to realign early childhood systems (ECS) to meet family preferences and promote positive outcomes/in The i3 we are a village grant: Successes, challenges. However, there is little research on systems-level RFE strategies. We held two focus groups with eight informants involved in RFE activities in an ECS initiative and asked informants about enablers and barriers to systems building RFE. We performed a thematic analysis using a phenomenological approach, and identified three themes: building team cohesion, capacity building and reach, and resources and capital. Our findings suggest that ECS leaders looking to enhance programmatic RFE strategy could employ relational techniques to affirm flexibility in RFE duties, model open communication, appreciate existing skills, and provide opportunities to expand skills. ECS-building may benefit from an RFE approach but should be met with bureaucratic buy-in for RFE to succeed on a structural level.

The early years of childhood represent a critical time frame in emotional development. This qualitative study sought to elucidate the impact of parental relationships and parents’ emotional intelligence on young children’s development of emotional intelligence capacity, as well as changes in this development when a dyadic clinical intervention was applied. The study setting was a children’s psychiatric clinic in Israel. Participants were five preschool non-clinically diagnosed children (3 girls, 2 boys, aged 5–6) and their parents (1 father, 4 mothers) and five preschool clinically diagnosed children (3 boys, 2 girls, aged 5–6) and their parents (5 fathers, 4 mothers) (N = 20). Clinically diagnosed children and parents received a dyadic intervention; non-clinically diagnosed children and parents did not. The methodological framework was rooted in phenomenology. We gathered data using semi-structured interviews and applied thematic analysis to dissect the complex interplay between parents’ emotional intelligence and relationship with their children, and the children’s emotional development. Initial findings pointed to a nuanced improvement in the emotional expression abilities of clinically diagnosed children post-intervention, implying the efficacy of the intervention and suggesting the importance of integrating parental education on emotional intelligence and responsive strategies as part of child-focused interventions. This could foster children’s emotional growth and enhance parent-child relationships, contributing to a holistic strategy for fostering emotional intelligence in early childhood.

In this study, we analyze activities in which early childhood education and care (ECEC) teachers, together with pairs of children, engage in digital storytelling activities with a tablet application. The participating teachers and children speak more than one national language, and the activity has been pursued with the intention of supporting children’s full use of their various semiotic repertoires. Theoretically informed by a sociocultural perspective, the notion of semiotic repertoires here refers to not only national languages, such as English and Swedish, but also other semiotic means for communication such as sign language, gestures, and drawings. With the purpose of addressing how ECEC can be responsive to children’s repertoires of semiotic means of communication, the research question asked is: How are various semiotic repertoires introduced and responded to in the storytelling activities? The results consist of a differentiation and specification of the meaning of responsivity in the context of semiotic repertoires. The implications for children’s participation in developmental activities and the ambition of creating socially just ECEC institutions are discussed.

Early childhood professionals play a critical role in the lives of the children they work with, and their psychological well-being significantly impacts this relationship. Over recent years, societal changes, coupled with new policy, has increased the demands and pressures faced by these professionals. Therefore, the current mixed methods study set out to explore the well-being of early childhood providers (i.e., owner, owner-managers) in Ireland. In total, 489 participants completed the anonymous online survey, which included the WHO-5 questionnaire and an open-ended question that explored reasons for any stress experienced in the previous 2-week period. Almost 60% of participants scored 50 or lower and over 20% scored 28 or lower, indicating poor well-being and potential depression. The majority of participants reported feeling stressed in the 2-week period prior to completing the survey and frequently cited work-related issues as being the source of their stress. The major themes that emerged were burden of administration, overwhelming financial pressure, and staffing issues. These findings indicate that early childhood providers would benefit from bottom-up and top-down assistance to positively support their well-being. This is vital if they are to thrive in their professional roles and provide high quality, transformative experiences for our children.

Engaging in vivid conversations is crucial for the social and cognitive development of young children and for building their understanding of science phenomena. In this regard, educators play a pivotal role in shaping interactions with learners by providing adequate scaffolds to promote sustained shared thinking. Tablet computers are considered to have substantial potential for supporting learning, particularly in enriching communication and collaboration, as well as in making science phenomena more accessible. However, there are concerns that increased screen time may lead to social isolation. To address this situation, the present multiple-case study explores the impact of using tablet computers’ video functionality on the quality of teacher–child interactions during a specific play-based learning scenario in the domain of science. The investigation, which employed a mixed-method approach, followed two individual teachers separately during 24 lessons each in a videographic setup and isolated 200 science content-relevant interaction episodes. These episodes were coded according to their interaction quality in an inter-rater agreement procedure using MAXQDA. High-quality interactions were defined as those episodes involving a deep, prolonged, intellectual and content-specific exchange between the teacher and at least one child, based on both teacher and children playing their active roles in the participation of the talk. The results indicated that using tablets in the specific play scenario under investigation was associated with teacher–child interactions of longer duration, variable scaffold quality among teachers, and increased verbal engagement from children. These results counter the concerns that the use of digital media might lead to screen-based isolation and suggest that tablet computers can be harnessed for valuable educational interactions.