Early Childhood Education Journal最新文献

This paper is part of a broader research initiative examining algebraic thinking. It presents a case study involving a 4 year-old female student, examining her functional perspective through individual work. Our interest lies in early childhood functional thinking. Specifically, our research objective is to describe how the child completed two tasks involving linear functions and their respective inverse functions. We posed questions related to specific near numbers, specific far numbers, and the generalizations themselves. We gathered data from her individual written work on the two tasks and from an individual interview. We analyzed the strategies she employed to generalize, the representations and generalizations she made, and how she established relationships between variables. We observed that she used pictorial and verbal representations to complete the proposed tasks and successfully achieved generalization. As a strategy, she counted drawings; however, when verbalizing her approach, she created groups of similar elements and innately distributed them into equal groups when working with the inverse function.

As prekindergarten and kindergarten (PreK/K) programs continue to expand into public elementary schools, a key actor in this process of integration and alignment is the school principal. While there is a growing body of scholarship that examines how principals integrate and align these programs with the later grades of elementary school, little is known about how principals identify the support prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers need to be successful in educating and preparing their students for school success; such information can provide insight into principals’ understanding of the work PreK/K teachers are doing daily in their classrooms. This case study examines this issue by investigating how a sample of elementary school principals in Texas made sense of the support PreK/K teachers require to be successful in their positions. Such findings reveal principals’ sensemaking of PreK/K teachers and their programs. These findings also illuminate what principals and their teachers might need from district and state administrators to lead these programs more effectively so that all students can begin their academic careers on a trajectory to thrive in elementary school.

The rapid proliferation of digital media has significantly transformed childhood experiences, necessitating an understanding of its impact on preschoolers’ development. This study illuminates the nature of YouTube interactions among preschool-aged children, underlining the importance of this research in the broader context of digital media’s role in early childhood. Addressing a vital gap, the work explores how these interactions influence aspirations and consumer behavior within a Turkish cultural framework. Employing semi-structured interviews, data was meticulously gathered from 25 parent-child pairs, providing a narrative-driven exploration into digital engagement. The findings reveal a dual-faceted impact: children exhibited emotional responses and altered aspirations post-YouTube exposure, with a marked inclination towards consumerism influenced by digital content. This underscores the potency of social learning through digital platforms. However, the research scope was confined to a specific locale, necessitating caution when extending conclusions beyond this demographic. The results prompt a reevaluation of parental mediation practices, suggest potential for educational integration of digital media, and advocate for the necessity of culturally attuned digital content regulation. Implications for future research include diversifying methodologies and participant demographics to further substantiate the findings and expand their applicability.

Classmates’ academic and executive function (EF) skills are important predictors of individual EF and achievement. The present study investigated the effects of peer EF, using a battery of measures, on individual EF and academic achievement in preschool. Peer effects were assessed for 321 preschool-aged children from 48 classrooms. Using hierarchical linear modeling, peer EF predicted student gains in executive function, vocabulary, and math, but not literacy. Results suggested that classrooms with higher overall EF had students who achieved more skills over the course of the school year in comparison to children in classrooms with lower levels of EF. The effect of fall peer EF on spring student EF was greater for low-income dual language learners (DLLs) than monolinguals. Findings suggest that EF, math, and vocabulary knowledge are socially mediated by peers and can have differential effects on DLLs.

Early writing includes both transcription skills (e.g., handwriting and spelling) and composing skills (e.g., the generation, manipulation, and translation of ideas into writing), yet early composing is not as well understood in academic research or by classroom educators. This study seeks to understand 1) how children retained or modified core idea units from pre-writing verbalizations to post-writing verbalizations and 2) how these transformations are related to other composing components, such as connection of ideas. Participants in this study included 133 children at the end of their prekindergarten year. Children completed two composing tasks related to planning a birthday party: an Invitation task and a List task, in which they were asked what they planned to write before writing and then what they had written after writing. Results indicate that most children’s pre- and post-verbalizations were connected in meaning. While children overwhelmingly modified their core ideas on both tasks, more children retained ideas on the List task than the Invitation task. Children most often concurrently added and deleted ideas on both tasks, but did so less often when pre- and post-verbalizations were connected in meaning. Implications for supporting the complete writing process, from planning to review and revision, in classroom practices as well as further directions for research are discussed.

In this study, we measured attitudes, beliefs, and intentions about implementing outdoor learning experiences among 56 early childhood professionals before and after attending Growing Up WILD™ (GUW) training. Online pre- and post-surveys were distributed to participants measuring a range of attitudes (i.e., comfort and confidence), beliefs, and intentions (i.e., planning). Overall, after attending GUW training, participants reported feeling more confident facilitating conversations with children about nature and science and more comfortable about planning teacher directed activities, allowing children to take risks, and offering free play. They also expressed fewer concerns about potential barriers to going outside such as family concerns, materials, and curriculum. It also demonstrated participants had greater intentions to engage children in outdoor learning experiences (e.g., outdoor field trips and nature walks). Our findings highlight the impact that GUW training, a brief intervention, can have on early childhood professionals’ attitudes, beliefs, and intentions toward implementing outdoor education. We hope that these attitudinal shifts will encourage early childhood professionals to take young children outside so they can enjoy the benefits of outdoor education.

Creativity is widely recognized as a crucial factor for both personal and social advancement. Given that the early years lay the foundation for future learning and development, fostering creativity during this period is of paramount importance. To facilitate and optimize creativity in the classroom, it is essential to understand teachers’ conceptualization of creativity and their instructional approaches. This paper reviewed 20 empirical studies conducted in various cultural contexts over the past decade, focusing on early childhood educators’ perceptions and beliefs about creativity and teaching practices for promoting creativity. The findings indicated that teachers generally have a shared understanding of the definition of creativity and recognize the importance of nurturing creativity in young children. However, several obstacles hinder their efforts to foster creativity in the classroom, including insufficient support from administrators and parents, as well as a lack of training and preparation for creative teaching practices.

This study explored how seven Montessori teachers from across three countries perceive and practice literacy. One-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant over the 2022–23 school year. Qualitative analyses, in which interview transcripts were coded using an open-coding technique, revealed three themes about how Montessori teachers from Canada, Mexico, and Italy perceive and practice literacy: 1. Emphasis on oral language; 2. Explicit and systematic instruction; and 3. Literacy-rich environments. Understanding how Montessori teachers perceive and practice literacy can provide insight into the patterns of literacy learning across geographical contexts. In particular, findings from this study highlight the effectiveness of the Montessori approach across diverse settings and how literacy learning in Montessori classrooms can adapt to different cultural contexts and languages.

Early childhood digital pedagogy (ECDP) has been widely implemented and studied, but the empirical evidence has not been systematically reviewed. This scoping review aimed to synthesize the existing studies to understand the practices and profiles of ECDP and the redefined roles of teacher, child, and technology. Thirty-eight studies on ECDP published from January 2010 to October 2024 were collected from three academic databases: EBSCO, Web of Science, and ProQuest. Synthesis of the findings of these studies revealed that: Firstly, digital technologies increasingly hold transformative potential for instructional practices at the level of modification and redefinition based on the SAMR framework. Secondly, play-based, project-based, problem-based, and co-operative and collaborative pedagogy with constructivist tendencies are the trademarks of ECDP. Lastly, in pedagogical interactions, teachers, children, and digital technologies each play diverse roles. This review study sheds some light on the practical characteristics of ECDP, which can inspire the effective designs and implementation of ECDP in the future.

Early writing is an important early literacy skill related to later reading and writing development. Writing assessment and instruction, however, tends to focus on just part of early writing development, transcription (i.e., handwriting and spelling), whereas composing (i.e., text generation) is an essential component of early and later writing. In fact, several assessments of early writing do not include items that elicit composing and others provide composing items that are too challenging for early writers, yielding floor effects. This study provides evidence for a new approach for eliciting and scoring both transcription and composing from preschool age children. Study 1 provides evidence that within a structured and contextualized assessment in which children compose their own messages, young children can demonstrate transcription skills aligning with the skills they demonstrate on traditional writing assessments (e.g., letter and word writing). Study 2 provides evidence that the structured and contextualized assessment can elicit and score children’s transcription and composing skills such as relevance to the theme, idea generation, genre features, verbal-text match. These two studies provide evidence of item functioning for both transcription and composing items important for research and instructional practice.