The Development of Children’s Concept of a Substance: A Longitudinal Study of Interaction Between Curriculum and Learning

This paper is a reflection on a three-year longitudinal study that explored the development of children’s concept of a substance, for which detailed results concerning children’s understandings have been reported elsewhere. The attention in this paper is on the methodological features related to the longitudinal nature of the study and the insights into pupils’ learning that were afforded by its design. There is, of course, an extensive literature on children’s understandings of scientific ideas, and the nature of conceptual change involved in learning is a contested area. I argue in the paper that longitudinal studies are uniquely placed to inform the debate, and by focusing on this particular study the aim is to demonstrate the kind of contribution that can be made.     

Early Educators’ Collective Workplace Stress as a Predictor of Professional Development’s Impacts on Children’s Development

Although professional development is widely used to improve the impacts of early childhood education, little is known about the conditions under which such interventions promote child outcomes. This study applies newly developed methods for quantifying intervention impact heterogeneity to understand whether educators’ collective workplace stress moderates professional development’s impacts on children’s language and literacy skills, executive functioning, and learning behaviors. Within a sample of 406 children from the National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education Professional Development Study (M_age = 4.17; 50% female; 50% Black, 32% Latinx, 11% White), professional development positively impacted child outcomes in centers where educators collectively reported high workplace stress but negatively impacted child outcomes in centers where educators collectively reported low workplace stress.     

The Development of Children’s Understanding of Speed Change: A Contributing Factor Towards Commonsense Theories of Motion

Previous research indicates children reason in different ways about horizontal motion and motion in fall. At the same time, their understanding of motion down inclines appears to result from an interaction between horizontal and vertical motion understanding. However, this interaction is still poorly understood. Understanding of speed change may shed further light due to its critical role in natural object motion. This is addressed by the present two studies. Children (n = 144) aged 5–11 years predicted whether a ball, either heavy or light, would accelerate, decelerate or move at unchanging speed along a horizontal, in fall and down an incline, both in a real-object task (Study 1) and a computer-presented task (Study 2). The results suggest understanding of speed change is typically limited to the expectation that change takes place between a point of no motion and any subsequent point in motion, but not between two subsequent points. Despite improvements with age, predictions of continued speed change barely exceeded chance levels in the oldest age group. Modest effects of object mass were noted. Response time data provide further insight regarding children’s predictions, highlighting similarities and differences in reasoning between motion dimensions. The overall findings are used to develop clearer ideas about the development of children’s understanding of speed change as well as to advance commonsense theories of motion.     

Children’s development of a theory of mind

A critical review of the literature on the theory of mind is presented. Consistent with the “early onset” view, it is suggested that important precursors of a theory of mind are found much earlier than the age of 4. Research on emotional development and intentional communication is reviewed to suggest that some rudimentary understanding of other people’s minds occurs before the age of 2. Later, 3-year-olds’ engagement in pretense and deception demonstrates a more sophisticated understanding of other people’s mental states. Limitations of the false belief task for determining the acquisition of a theory of mind will be discussed with reference to findings in the adult literature.     

Influence of Self-Regulation on the Development of Children’s Number Sense

The present study examined predictive power of behavioral self-regulation, family and child characteristics on children’s number sense. The participants consisted of 101 kindergarten children. A subsample of 30 children was randomly chosen for the reliability procedures of Assessing Number Sense and Head, Toes, Knees and Shoulders instruments. Thus, data from 71 children were used for further analysis. Multiple regressions using stepwise method were computed for determining whether self-regulation, family income, parents’ level of education, gender, and age related to and were predictive of scores on number sense. Results of the study indicated that behavioral self-regulation, mothers’ education level, gender and age are significant predictors of number sense, and behavioral self-regulation was the most influential predictor, followed by mothers’ education level, gender and age. Findings are discussed in terms of influential factors of number sense in early childhood.     

Development and validation of Children’s Responsible Environmental Behavior Scale

Though environmentally responsible behavior (ERB) has been a focus of many studies in the field of environmental education, very few scales have been developed to assess children’s ERB. In this regard, this article focuses on the development and validation of Children’s Responsible Environmental Behavior Scale (CREBS) and also reports the psychometric properties of this scale. The items in the CREBS were developed initially from the responses to four open-ended items by 229 fourth and fifth grade students. This initial form was pilot tested with 673 fourth and fifth graders and then subjected to exploratory factor analysis. Later, the revised version of the scale was administrated to 2412 fifth graders, and those results were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis. CREBS consists of 23 items measured using a seven-point Likert-type scale, which have been organized into four sub-scales: political action (six items, α?=?.92); eco-management (six items, α?=?.70); consumer and economic action (five items, α?=?.70); and Individual and Public Persuasion (six items, α?=?.80). Study results indicate that CREBS can be used for exploring the extent to which elementary school students in Turkey demonstrate four types of behavior to help prevent and resolve environmental problems and issues.     

Raising a Difficult Child: Interplay Among Children’s Negative Emotionality Traits,Maternal Parenting,and Children’s Cognitive Development

Research Findings: The present study examined (a) whether children’s negative emotionality traits (anger proneness and unsoothability) interactively predict mothers’ authoritarian parenting (AP) and (b) whether children’s negative emotionality moderates the associations between AP and children’s performance on a spatial cognitive task. Eighty mother–child dyads were recruited from Seoul, Korea (children’s age = 45–66 months). The findings were as follows. First, when children were prone to anger and were simultaneously difficult to soothe, mothers were inclined to show more AP. However, when children were relatively low in either of the traits, such as when children were difficult to soothe but not prone to anger, higher levels of unsoothability were associated with less AP. Second, depending on the degree of children’s anger proneness, the associations between children’s spatial intelligence and AP varied. Among children with higher levels of anger proneness, less AP was associated with lower performance on a spatial cognitive task, whereas the opposite pattern was observed among children with lower anger proneness. Practice or Policy: This study implies that the configurations of temperamental traits and the levels of parental control need to be considered in designing teacher and parent education programs, probably in relation to the cultural context.     

Distinctions Without a Difference? Preschool Curricula and Children’s Development

Abstract

Public preschool programs require the use of a research-based, whole-child curriculum, yet limited research examines whether curricula influence classroom experiences and children’s development. We use five samples of preschool children to examine differences in classroom processes and children’s school readiness by classroom curricular status (curriculum/no curriculum), and across classrooms using different curricular packages. When a teacher reports using a curriculum, their classroom processes are indistinguishable from classrooms where teachers report using no curriculum. Some differences in classroom activities emerged across classrooms using different curricula; however, substantial variability exists across classrooms using the same curriculum. Head Start program fixed effects models and meta-analytic regressions reveal few associations between curricula and children's skills. Findings question whether preschool curricular policy benefit child development.     

Children’s sense of agency in preschool: a sociocultural investigation

This socioculturally informed study investigated children’s sense of agency in relation to their everyday life in preschool. The empirical data comprised focus groups reflection situations wherein Finnish preschool children (n. 19, aged 6–7) reflected on their everyday life with the help of photographs and drawings they made. Building on a situative and discursive take on the sense of agency, the results of this study highlight the different forms of the sense of agency talked into being in the focus groups. The results also provide evidence of the different activities within which children’s sense of agency was embedded. In addition, the study also engages with the notion of radical passivity to theoretically explore the borders of the concept of the sense of agency. In all, the study demonstrates the mundane side of children’s sense of agency and its subtle dynamics in day-to-day life in preschool.     

Assessing cohesion in children’s writing: Development of a checklist

Cohesion in writing is achieved through the use of linguistic devices that tie ideas together across a text, and is an important element in the development of coherent writing. Research shows that inter- and intra-developmental differences may appear in how children learn to use these devices, but cohesion is commonly overlooked in the evaluation and instruction of writing. In this study, we developed a checklist to assess cohesion in the writing of children in Grades 4–7, with the purpose of informing instructional practices. Following the procedure outlined by Crocker and Algina (1986), we developed and evaluated a checklist designed to assess the types of cohesive devices present in the writing of children. The checklist items showed fair to good discrimination between high and low scoring writers as demonstrated by a classical item analysis. We also found good interrater reliability, and evidence for discriminative validity. As internal consistency was weak, however, further research is needed to refine the instrument. Implications for the assessment of cohesion and future research are discussed.     

The Problem of ‘Power’: Metacritical Implications of Aetonormativity for Children’s Literature Research

This article takes as its starting point the concept of aetonormativity (the adult normativity germane to the discourse of children’s literature), coined by Maria Nikolajeva (2010) in an attempt to unify the increasingly power-oriented theories of children’s literature criticism within the past few decades. Acknowledging the usefulness of this concept, but wary of the fact that it could imply an easy transference of “adult” power theory to the study of children’s literature, I argue that an aetonormativity-centred system of children’s literature criticism crucially needs to reconceptualise the notion of “power” which lies at its heart. Any automatic connection between adult normativity and adult “power” would thus be questioned and critiqued. I propose a first conceptual split of “power” into “authority” and “might”, and a consequent redistribution of these two concepts to the adult and child parties in the children’s book. I then investigate the critical and metacritical implications, within the framework of an aetonormativity-centred criticism of children’s literature, of an increased subtlety in the use and handling of the concept of power when referring to the complex medium of the children’s text.     

Gender Effects in Children’s Development and Education

This paper attempts to clarify several lines of research on gender in development and education, inter‐relating findings from studies on intuitive/informal knowledge with those from research on achievements and attitudes in science. It acknowledges the declining proportions of male teachers world‐wide and examination successes which indicate a reversal of educational disadvantage from female to male; as well as the recent evidence on the effects of the gender of teachers upon student success. An empirical contribution to the literature is offered, drawing from the gender‐related findings from research on children’s cosmologies in China and New Zealand with 346 boys and 340 girls (of whom 119 boys and 121 girls participated in the current study). The investigation focused on children’s concepts of the motion and shape of the Earth through observational astronomy and gave children opportunities to express their ideas in several modalities. The in‐depth interviews allowed children to share their meanings with gender differences becoming apparent (e.g. girls’ superior ability to visually represent their cosmologies and boys’ greater awareness of gravity). However, these differences were not universal across genders or cultures and marked similarities were apparent both in the content of children’s responses and in their reasoning processes. By comparing boy/girl cosmological concept categories and by tracking their developmental trends by age, statistical evidence revealed the extent of the similarities within and across these diverse cultures. The findings reinforce those from the authors’ knowledge restructuring and cultural mediation studies and provide support for the view that boys and girls have similar, holistic‐rather‐than‐fragmented, cosmologies which have features in common across cultures and ethnic groups.     

Relating Preschool Quality to Children’s Literacy Development

Preschool classrooms were investigated to determine the extent to which quality is related to children’s literacy development. The study included 24 classrooms of 428 prekindergarten children in a large, urban Midwestern school district. Results suggest that global classroom quality and literacy environment quality are strongly related. Literacy environment quality and children’s literacy abilities are also related. Differences in classroom quality were found to have an impact on children’s literacy scores—the higher the quality, the higher the scores. This article also describes lessons learned from the investigation and provides suggestions for teachers and administrators for improving quality to enhance literacy development.     

The United Kingdom Children’s Laureate: The Story So Far

Britain’s Children’s Laureate Scheme has now been running for 14 years. This article asks Quentin Blake, Anne Fine, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Browne, Michael Rosen and Julia Donaldson for their views on their own experience of taking up this post. It concludes with a discussion of the recurring issues raised by these Laureates along with a look at possible future developments.     

Understanding Virtual Epidemics: Children’s Folk Conceptions of a Computer Virus

Our work investigates the annual outbreak of Whypox, a virtual epidemic in Whyville.net, a virtual world with over 1.2 million registered players ages 8–16. We examined online and classroom participants’ understanding of a computer virus using surveys and design activities. Our analyses reveal that students have a mostly na?ve understanding of a computer virus influenced by mythological or anthropomorphic perspectives; only few were able to describe computational elements. The 35 students who participated in a curricular intervention in addition to the virtual epidemic shared these na?ve conceptions initially, but developed more sophisticated views after the intervention. The discussion addresses possible explanations for students’ conceptions and implications for future instructional designs.     

The Home Literacy Environment Is a Correlate,but Perhaps Not a Cause,of Variations in Children’s Language and Literacy Development

The home literacy environment is a well-established predictor of children’s language and literacy development. We investigated whether formal, informal, and indirect measures of the home literacy environment predict children’s reading and language skills once maternal language abilities are taken into account. Data come from a longitudinal study of children at high risk of dyslexia (N = 251) followed from preschool years. Latent factors describing maternal language were significant predictors of storybook exposure but not of direct literacy instruction. Maternal language and phonological skills respectively predicted children’s language and reading/spelling skills. However, after accounting for variations in maternal language, storybook exposure was not a significant predictor of children’s outcomes. In contrast, direct literacy instruction remained a predictor of children’s reading/spelling skills. We argue that the relationship between early informal home literacy activities and children’s language and reading skills is largely accounted for by maternal skills and may reflect genetic influences.