Early Childhood Education Journal最新文献

At present, research exploring educator’s understandings of displays of student work is scant yet such displays are regularly exhibited within the community spaces of early learning and elementary schools. These displays communicate messages to those within the space about teacher and student agency, curricular priorities, children and their work, and the relationship between teaching and learning. Grounded in a framework of documentality and teacher vision, this paper explores the ways in which preservice teachers (PSTs) understand teacher-cultivated, student work documentation. This research used a Photo-Elicitation Interview methodology to develop a descriptive account of PSTs' visions and understandings of teacher-cultivated, classroom documentation and displays of children's work. Findings reveal that PSTs held paradoxical views of student work documentation teetering between an appreciation of an adult-centered aesthetic disconnected from their academic and creative capacities to an expressed valuing of an agentic positioning of children in the experiences of the classroom.

Although quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) and strong collaborations between families and ECEC educators are important for all children, they may be particularly important for children and families who utilize nighttime or weekend ECEC. This study focuses on ECEC educators’ discourses about closeness versus distance in educational collaborations between parents with nonstandard schedules and professionals who work in extended hours ECEC. The data for this study were collected by interviewing ECEC teachers (n = 12) and nurses (n = 18) working in Finland. Research findings: Using the principles of discourse analysis, we found three tensional discourses: (a) the timing of ECEC and asynchrony; (b) a sense of time versus hurry; and (c) care versus criticism. Practice and policy: The findings revealed that extended hours ECEC provides both challenges and possibilities for creating close educational collaboration with parents. This has important implications for the kinds of structural supports and training educators in extended hours ECEC may need to foster quality collaboration with families.

The body of literature for a professional field is created by voices from people who share their ideas with others through scholarly writing. How do emerging scholars acquire the requisite academic writing skills to publish and contribute to publishing research in our profession? Mentorship is a time-honored practice that could be considered. One possible way to prepare people to amplify their voices through their scholarly writing is through mentorships. Writing mentorships, defined here as a productive collaboration between a more experienced academic author and an emergent scholar that results in professional publication, is the focus of this article. The authors will provide an overview of a specific mentorship program called, Division for Early Childhood Consortium for Innovations in Doctoral Excellence (DECIDE). The article concludes with strategies for generating more productive and satisfying mentor and mentee writing relationships with recommendations for future research.

Research on immigrant populations shows that child care choices are dependent on the population’s region of origin. While the Russian immigrant population in the United States comprises the largest group of immigrants from Eastern Europe and is likely to increase in the future, there is virtually no research on Russian immigrant families’ child care search and selection criteria. This qualitative study applies the theoretical model of Pungello and Kurtz-Costes (1999), which illustrates how factors such as parental demographic characteristics, environmental context, child characteristics, and parental beliefs play into families’ child care selection. The study draws from semi-structured interviews with 11 Russian immigrant families residing in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States to examine their child care search processes and selection criteria. Results revealed that most parents found child care through friends’ recommendations, Internet search, and online reviews. Nine themes describing child care criteria valued by Russian immigrant families emerged from the analysis. Specifically, parents mentioned culture and personal beliefs, child characteristics, convenience, cost and subsidy, education and learning, program features, facilities and environment, teacher characteristics, and rating and reputation as the major factors in selecting child care. Understanding Russian immigrant parents’ child care information sources and selection criteria will allow for early care and education (ECE) providers to accommodate the needs of Russian immigrant population and for policymakers to facilitate access to ECE programs for these families.

Extensive studies have documented cognitive and social-emotional benefits associated with bilingualism. However, past research has considered the cognitive and social-emotional benefits of being bilingual separately, despite research suggesting the convergence of these two domains. This tendency persists even for research that decenters English acquisition and focuses more broadly on benefits associated with multi-language learning (MLL). Furthermore, extant theoretical frameworks that address MLL motivation have generally failed to consider the cognitive and social-emotional benefits as motivators for pursuing MLL. Therefore, the present review synthesizes the cognitive and social-emotional benefits associated with multilingualism with the goal of making suggestions for expounding upon MLL frameworks to reflect a broader range of motivations. We suggest that motivation frameworks consider the cognitive and social-emotional gains associated with multilingualism. In doing so, frameworks have the potential to help us better understand caregivers’ and learners’ key impetuses in pursuing MLL.

As early as preschool, Black children are more at risk than their peers to receive exclusionary practices. These negative early childhood school experiences can create greater risk for entrance into the preschool-to-prison pipeline. However, familial protective factors can help reduce exposure and mitigate this systemic pipeline for young children. The purpose of this study was to determine the familial factors associated with reducing a child’s entrance into the preschool-to-prison pipeline. Results from this study indicated that there were differences in perspectives among teachers and families regarding their child’s academic and behavioral risk. The findings also suggest that consistent strategies and collaboration among teachers and families can serve as familial protective factors, potentially mitigating the risk of academic failures and behavioral disorders.

In recent years the notion of teachers as researchers in their own educational settings has become more prominent and encouraged in research literature. In the context of early childhood education (ECE), the participatory role of teachers is especially suited given its multidisciplinary and practice-based research space. This paper explores this premise and presents a scoping review of ECE studies which have employed a Design-based research (DBR) methodology. The review revealed DBR to be a very recent evolution of participatory methodologies with 25 international studies identified from 2013 to 2023, with differing notions and levels of participation within their phase design and overlapping focus areas and outputs. Implications are discussed in relation to the nature of participants’ roles in DBR, and the emergence of DBR as an apt model of research-informed professional learning for early childhood educators.

The development of self-regulation is critical for children’s positive interactions with others and successful adjustment to school. Using their self-regulation skills, children can adapt their temperamental, emotional, and behavioral reactions to environmental stimuli. Greater self-regulation is advantageous in the classroom, as more regulated children have an easier time with basic behavioral expectations, and are more likely to persist with difficult tasks, work efficiently, and pay attention to instructions. INSIGHTS into Children’s Temperament (INSIGHTS) is a temperament-based intervention that improves kindergarten and first-grade children’s social-emotional development and academic learning. In the current study, we examined the effects of INSIGHTS on rural Midwestern children’s self-regulation development (i.e., attention, inhibitory control), compared to control classrooms. In addition, we explored the effects of children’s baseline self-regulation and the effects of the intervention on children’s developmental trajectories. Students (N = 147) from 61 classrooms were randomly assigned to INSIGHTS or control conditions by school. Children’s self-regulation skills whereas examined at four different times. Multiple regression models were fit, and results suggest that INSIGHTS participants exhibited greater self-regulation at Time 4 as compared to the control group. Additionally, latent growth curve models were used to model linear growth. Results suggest that INSIGHTS participants experienced increased growth rates for attention, inhibitory control, and sustained attention compared to the control group. Our study provides evidence for the positive effects of a social-emotional classroom intervention on the developmental trajectory of children’s self-regulation.

This study examined the effect of a shared reading routine on the geometry vocabulary knowledge of four preschool children at risk for language delays. Literacy-based interventions can be used to teach vocabulary for children at risk for language delays, incorporating interactive questioning techniques and explicit definitions. Children were taught geometry vocabulary, specifically attributes (i.e., characteristics) of two-dimensional shapes and examples from the storybooks (i.e., contextualized examples) and personal experiences (i.e., decontextualized examples). A dialogic shared reading activity was used with the PEER scaffolding steps and selected question prompts from CROWD with multiple exposures to the target words. This study utilized a single-case, multiple probe across word sets (i.e., tiers) and intervention sessions were delivered one-on-one with each participant. A probe, referred to as a knowledge check, was administered in every session across phases. Each participant improved in some aspects of geometry vocabulary knowledge. Suggestions for future research to build upon this intervention are discussed.

The writing process approach is recognized as an effective instructional practice for engaging children in the writing process and developing emerging writing skills. The writing conference is an integral component of the writing process. One-on-one conferencing sessions create differentiated instructional spaces for teachers to respond to the individual needs of learners. Understanding how teachers leverage conferencing sessions to effectively engage and support young learners’ writing remains a limited area of research. This case study documents one experienced teacher’s conferencing practices with 19 first-grade writers. Findings show conferencing conversations worked in an integrated, multidimensional way to support young writers. Conferencing dimensions leveraged children’s funds of knowledge, questioning and affirming statements, and writers’ craft components to nurture relationships and offer feedback aligned with children’s zone of proximal development.