Intelligence beliefs,goal orientations and children’s academic achievement: does the children’s gender matter?

This study evaluated how gender is related to children’s intelligence beliefs, goal orientations and academic achievement and whether there are gender differences in how intelligence beliefs and goal orientations are related to academic achievement. The participants, 362 seventh grade students (55.8% girls; Mage = 13.20, SD = .57 years), completed measures regarding their intelligence beliefs and goal orientations at the beginning of the second semester and the grades were collected at the end of the semester. Girls reported higher scores on incremental belief, mastery goal and higher achievement but lower levels of performance avoidance compared to boys. The relations between intelligence beliefs and academic achievement were fully mediated by both performance goals. Further, there were no gender differences in the associations among intelligence beliefs, goal orientations and achievement. The findings reveal that goal orientations are a mechanism that might explain why intelligence beliefs are linked with academic achievement in early adolescence.     

From preschool teachers’ professional development to children’s knowledge: comparing sets

Recently, there have been increased calls for enhancing preschool children’s mathematics knowledge along with increasing calls for preparing preschool teachers to meet the demands of new preschool mathematics curricula. This article describes the professional development program Starting Right: Mathematics in Preschools. Focusing on four episodes that revolve around the topic of equivalent sets, it demonstrates how engaging preschool teachers with challenging tasks may promote their subject matter knowledge as well as their pedagogical content knowledge, leading to an interweaving of knowledge and practice. Assessment of the program included assessing the children’s knowledge. Results indicated that students of participating teachers learned to be more flexible and to give more possible answers than students of non-participating teachers.     

Parents resourcing children’s early development and learning

Parents deal with a complex web of choices when seeking and using knowledge and resources related to their young children’s literacy development. Information concerning children’s learning and development comes in many forms and is produced by an increasingly diverse range of players including governments, non‐government organisations and commercial businesses. This study used a survey, interview and artefact collection to investigate mothers’ and fathers’ reported activities in seeking, accessing, producing and circulating information and resources related to children’s learning and development. Differences were found relating to parent gender and level of education. Parents’ resourcing activities are also shaped by their particular goals for their children.     

Parent–infant interaction and children’s language development

Learning to speak and understand language is a remarkable and important accomplishment of early childhood. Parent–infant interaction in the first three years is critical to this. This is the focus of this review – the first of the whole area. Seven databases were searched and 1750 studies reduced to 60 with good evidence. These 60 were from many disciplines and their methodological quality was variable. There was strong evidence that parental contingency (communication when the intended recipient is fully oriented towards receiving and processing it) and parental efforts in pre-literacy activities are important. There was strong evidence that interventions can be effective. Parental elaboration of language had less strong evidence. The role of gesture and the role of interaction with siblings and peers had the weakest evidence, but even these were quite well supported. Requirements for future research are specified. Parent–infant interaction is already established as a key factor in language development.     

A combined approach to strengthen children’s scientific thinking: direct instruction on scientific reasoning and training of teacher’s verbal support

Inquiry-based lessons have been demonstrated to improve children’s scientific thinking (i.e. reasoning abilities and domain-specific knowledge). Although empirical evidence shows that inquiry-based learning requires instruction, research comes from two approaches that have not been bridged yet: direct instruction of scientific reasoning and teacher training of verbal support. We investigated how these two types of instruction separately or combined strengthened children’s scientific thinking by comparing four conditions: baseline, direct instruction, verbal support, and a combined approach. Effectiveness of an inquiry-based lesson series on scientific reasoning abilities, vocabulary, and domain-specific knowledge (near and far transfer) were studied among 301 fourth graders. Results showed that both approaches strengthened different components of scientific reasoning abilities, and that a combination of instructions was most effective for scientific reasoning abilities, vocabulary, and domain-specific knowledge. Domain-specific knowledge acquisition was strengthened only when both instructions were provided. It can thus be concluded that each type of instruction has unique contributions to children’s science learning and that these instructions complement each other. Our study thus showed that inquiry-based lesson series when preceded by direct instruction of scientific reasoning and scaffolded with verbal support are most effective.     

Dutch children and their ‘God’: the development of the ‘God’ concept among indigenous and immigrant children in the Netherlands

In the 1980s and 1990s in the Netherlands, as a reaction to the growing number of non‐Christian pupils at Christian schools, religious education and religious development became issues for debate. At some schools, it was the exclusiveness of the Christian tradition that dominated, and at others it was the inclusiveness. Another group specialised in inter‐religious dialogue. Our research studied the religious development of pupils from two primary schools. One is the first and only inter‐religious primary school in the Netherlands, the Juliana van Stolberg primary school. The other is a Christian school, the Prinses Margriet primary school that educates pupils exclusively in the Christian tradition. The research questions focussed on the development of the ‘God’ concept of children confronted with stories from different religious traditions. The ‘God’ concept is seen in our research as a concept that develops in an inductive way from the data. This way of conceptualising ‘development’ is coined as the prospective perspective on development. The results of this comparative research led to the tentative conclusion that pupils in our research population who were involved in inter‐religious learning, demonstrate explorative behaviour concerning their own religion and that of others. Their ‘God’ concept shows hybrid characteristics. These pupils are rooted in their own tradition, and at the same time they are ‘on the move’. This offers points of departure for the development of citizens articulating their commitments and turning imminent conflicts into inter‐religious encounters.     

Spanking and young children’s socioemotional development in low- and middle-income countries

Spanking is one of the most common forms of child discipline used by parents around the world. Research on children in high-income countries has shown that parental spanking is associated with adverse child outcomes, yet less is known about how spanking is related to child well-being in low- and middle-income countries. This study uses data from 215,885 children in 62 countries from the fourth and fifth rounds of UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) to examine the relationship between spanking and child well-being. In this large international sample which includes data from nearly one-third of the world’s countries, 43% of children were spanked, or resided in a household where another child was spanked, in the past month. Results from multilevel models show that reports of spanking of children in the household were associated with lower scores on a 3-item socioemotional development index among 3- and 4-year-old children. Country-level results from the multilevel model showed 59 countries (95%) had a negative relationship between spanking and socioemotional development and 3 countries (5%) had a null relationship. Spanking was not associated with higher socioemotional development for children in any country. While the cross-sectional association between spanking and socioemotional development is small, findings suggest that spanking may be harmful for children on a more global scale than was previously known.     

Analyzing the development of children’s thinking: a review of “learning and teaching early math: the learning trajectories approach”

Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education -     

Sexualised music media and children’s gender role and self-identity development: a four-phase study

There has been much concern about the perceived increase in sexualised media and its potential impact on children’s well-being and development. This phenomenon was examined in a four-phase study focusing, specifically on music media. Phase 1 investigated the prevalence of sexualised music media broadcast on Australian free-to-air television in child-friendly time periods. Phase 2 examined children’s preferred music genres, artists and videos to assess their engagement with sexualised music media. Phase 3 examined children’s perceptions of gender roles and self-identities. Phase 4 explored children’s imitations of music media artists and performances. The study used a mixed-method approach incorporating content analysis, individual and group interviews, children’s activities and observations. Findings reveal that music media is a substantive influence shaping children’s everyday lives and proposes educating children about media influences from a young age.     

Pupil participation and playground design: listening and responding to children’s views

This article outlines a small-scale research project that attempted to involve primary aged pupils actively in the redesign of their school playground. The project stemmed from concerns raised by school staff regarding the frequency of problematic behaviours during unstructured times, particularly lunchtimes, and the decision to redesign the playground was one component of a larger scale research project. This article provides a critical account of this process, and an overview of the approach taken to involve children as co-researchers to ensure that their views were not only heard, but that they played a key role in decisions that would affect them. This offers an alternative way in which educational psychologists (EPs) can address teacher concerns regarding behaviour by attempting to involve and empower young people in the process.     

Type of child care and children’s development at 54 months

The types of non-maternal child care received by more than 1000 U.S. children were examined from birth to 54 months and related to family selection factors and to child outcomes. Individual children tended to experience a variety of different types of care and not to fit into clear patterns of either stable care types or progressive patterns of movement from less structured to more highly structured care settings. Across the entire sample, however, hours in center care were higher in the preschool period than earlier, whereas hours in relative care remained stable and hours in child care homes decreased. Mothers who were single, those with more education and less traditional beliefs about child rearing, and families with higher incomes and fewer children in the household were more likely to use more hours of center care than other families; single mothers and those with fewer children also used more hours of care in child care homes. Minority families, those with low incomes, and mothers with less education and fewer children used more hours of relative care. With family selection factors and quality of child care controlled, only hours in center care across the time period from 3 to 54 months were related to child outcomes. Children who experienced more center care were reported by caregivers at 54 months to have somewhat higher externalizing behavior problem scores than other children, although these scores were not in the clinical or at-risk range. Center care hours were also related to cognitive and language outcomes, with more hours in infancy associated with lower preacademic test scores and more hours in the toddler period with higher language scores.     

Evaluating young children’s creative coding: rubric development and testing for ScratchJr projects

Education and Information Technologies - Project-based assessment has been used to evaluate coding projects created by students for a long time. Nevertheless, there is a lack of rigorously tested...     

Eye-movements reveal children’s deliberative thinking and predict performance on arithmetic word problems

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Despite decades of research on the close link between eye movements and human cognitive processes, the exact nature of the link between eye movements...     

Do regulable features of child-care homes affect children’s development?

Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care were used to assess whether regulable features of child-care homes affect children’s development. Child-care homes selected were those in which there were at least two children and the care provider received payment for child care (ns=164 when the study children were 15 months old, 172 at 24 months, and 146 at 36 months). Caregivers who were better educated and had received more recent and higher levels of training provided richer learning environments and warmer and more sensitive caregiving. Caregivers who had more child-centered beliefs about how to handle children also provided higher quality caregiving and more stimulating homes. In addition, when settings were in compliance with recommended age-weighted group size cut-offs, caregivers provided more positive caregiving. Quality of care was not related to caregivers’ age, experience, professionalism, or mental health, or to the number of children enrolled in the child-care home or whether the caregivers’ children were present. Children with more educated and trained caregivers performed better on tests of cognitive and language development. Children who received higher quality care, in homes that were more stimulating, with caregivers who were more attentive, responsive, and emotionally supportive, did better on tests of language and cognitive development and also were rated as being more cooperative. These findings make a case for regulating caregivers’ education and training and for requiring that child-care homes not exceed the recommended age-weighted group size.