A phenomenological exploration of children’s school life and well-being

Learning Environments Research - This phenomenological study explored children’s school life as it relates to their subjective well-being in the United States (N?=?22). It was...     

Tiering in the GCSE: A children’s rights perspective

This article presents findings on students’ views and experiences of tiering in Northern Ireland and Wales from a children’s rights perspective. It considers the extent to which tiering fulfils the rights to education, best interests, non-discrimination, and participation under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It emphasises that while the majority of students were supportive of tiering, their responses highlighted a range of negative effects of tiering on students taking foundation tier. Students described the impact of being placed in the foundation tier on their self-esteem and relationship with their peers, indicating that being allocated to foundation tier can have a labelling effect. Students who were taking foundation papers, or a mixture of foundation and higher-tier papers, were more likely than those taking higher-tier papers to report that they wanted to change tier and to raise issues overall regarding tiering. Furthermore, students who were faced with these difficult choices often had a poor understanding of several aspects of tiers. The article argues that alternative forms of differentiation should be considered, and presents students’ perspectives on some of these. It argues that we must ensure that young people have a good understanding of tiering and that their views and experiences of tiering are taken into account when considering further reforms to GCSEs.     

The role of involvement and emotional well-being for preschool children’s scientific observation competency in biology

ABSTRACT

Observation is one of the basic methods in science. It is not only an epistemological method itself, but also an important competence for other methods like experimenting or comparing. However, there is little knowledge about the relation with affective factors of this inquiry method. In our study, we would like to find out about the relations of emotional well-being and involvement with children’s observation competency. Seventy preschool children participated in our test observing a living mouse, a snail and a fish. From their behaviour in the test situation, we coded their observation competency as well as their emotional well-being and involvement. The data show that both emotional well-being and involvement are significant predictors of children’s observation competency. Further analyses confirm our hypothesis of a mediating role of involvement between well-being and the performance in the observation task. In conclusion, theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Emotional and psychological well-being in children: the development and validation of the Stirling Children’s Well-being Scale

The Stirling Children’s Well-being Scale (SCWBS) was developed by the Stirling Council Educational Psychology Service (UK) as a holistic, positively worded measure of emotional and psychological well-being in children aged eight to 15 years. Drawing on current theories of well-being and Positive Psychology, the aim was to provide a means of measuring the effectiveness of interventions and projects designed to promote children’s well-being and emotional development.

A total of 18 schools and 1849 children participated in the construction and validation of the scale, which ultimately emerged as a short, robust measure comprising 12 items. The scale is offered for use by educational and health professionals interested in promoting and measuring the emotional development and well-being of children and the effectiveness of interventions.     

Using different art forms to investigate the impact on children’s involvement in literacy activities

Much of the research into factors that affect children’s school performance has focused on parental involvement rather than the nature of children’s activities undertaken in school. More research is therefore needed to examine the kinds of activities that affect performance and, in particular, whether the degree of involvement children experience in those activities can affect school performance. Children in free play often choose to be involved in arts activities so the arts could be considered as a promising approach. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of ‘Play and Learn through the Arts’ programme on children’s involvement during literacy activities in five- to six-year-old children. It was examined if the arts in general or a specific art form could contribute more to children’s involvement in literacy activities. Children from four different settings participated in this study. To measure the outcome of the intervention the LIS-YC was used and items such as children’s concentration, persistence and precision were measured. The findings were analysed using a mixed method approach and showed significant benefits in all the items in children’s levels of involvement in the arts group over the control group and no difference in effects among the different art forms.     

Transnational treaties on children’s rights: Norm building and circulation in the twentieth century

During the twentieth century, the socio-legal status of the child changed dramatically. The adoption of three international treaties specific to the rights of the child – namely, the Geneva Declaration (1924), the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights on the Child (1989) – increasing at each stage the number and different types of rights, is a remarkable illustration of this state of fact. National socio-legal developments have, of course, greatly inspired the authors of these treaties. However, the rights of the child assumed a new dimension in intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations, exchange platforms par excellence. This article seeks a better understanding of the circulation of children’s rights during the twentieth century, within the three above mentioned treaties. From an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective, the study aims to analyse the multiple facets of children’s rights and the origins of non-domestic influences in this international process. The article appraises the role of international and intergovernmental organisations. Based on archival data, it identifies the concepts, the institutions, the agents and the contexts that influenced the evolution of children’s rights. It shows how the genesis, the diffusion and the promotion of international treaties, as well as their subsequent regimes, structured the circulation of children’s rights.     

Positioning pedagogy—a matter of children’s rights

This paper foregrounds pedagogy in the realisation of children’s rights to non-discrimination and serving their best interests, as articulated in the UNCRC. Drawing on a mixed methodological study of teachers in 12 schools it does so through exploring teacher pedagogies in terms of how they 'think', 'do' and 'talk' pedagogy, conceived as their pedagogic 'habitus'. Findings confirm contradictions between teachers’ ideals and their practice that is significantly mediated by the socio-cultural context of their schools, gender and presence of migrant children. Especially striking is that neither social justice concerns nor children’s rights explicitly emerge in their narratives, in turn influencing how they ‘do’ pedagogy with different groups of children. This contradiction is understood as a dialectical process of re/action influenced by structures, policies and the exercise of power in local contexts. The UNCRC provides a generative mechanism within which to hold government to account for the impact of policies, especially in challenging contexts. To be realised in practice, however, it also needs to be embedded in teacher habitus, shaping their dispositions toward children’s rights to non-discrimination and serving their best interests in education.     

An interactive model of parents’ involvement and their children’s functioning in school

This study examined relationships between Parents’ involvement as related to their Identification and Alertness and to four students’ variables Attitudes toward school, Social adjustment, Self-efficacy and Academic achievements. Social adjustment was the most dominant variable and served as a mediator between self-efficacy and achievements. Parental involvement had significant, direct and positive relations with social adjustment but negative with academic achievements. Findings indicate a weakening of the relationships between parents’ involvement, identification, and alertness and children’s variables compared to the relationships between children’s variables. Educational staff and parents must create useful communication channels for helping children cope with the challenges of their social and media world.     

How working memory relates to children’s reading comprehension: the importance of domain-specificity in storage and processing

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of phonological and semantic storage, and phonological and semantic processing to reading comprehension in 123 Dutch children in fifth grade. We conducted regression and mediation analyses to find out to what extent variation in reading comprehension could be explained by storage and processing capacities in both the phonological and the semantic domain, while controlling for children’s decoding and vocabulary. The analyses included tasks that reflect storage only, and working memory tasks that assess processing in addition to storage. Regression analysis including only storage tasks as predictor measures, revealed semantic storage to be a better predictor of reading comprehension than phonological storage. Adding phonological and semantic working memory tasks as additional predictors to the model showed that semantic working memory explained individual variation in reading comprehension over and above all other memory measures. Additional mediation analysis made it clear that semantic storage contributed indirectly to reading comprehension via semantic working memory, indicating that semantic storage tapped by working memory, in addition to processing capacities, explains individual variation in reading comprehension. It can thus be concluded that semantic storage plays a more important role in children’s reading comprehension than previously thought.     

Seeking insights into young children’s beliefs about mathematics and learning

Challenges for researchers wishing to gain insights into student beliefs about mathematics and learning include the identification of prompts to which young children can respond easily and which have the potential to provide meaningful insights into their beliefs. This article reports on a selection of such prompts used within an exploratory study that investigated beliefs about mathematics, learning and helping factors for learning mathematics of eight children of 8 to 9 years of age. These prompts, described as creative interviewing procedures, are classified under the key categories of visual, verbal and text-based. The article provides brief details of the study as background but focuses on discussing the nature of the tasks, and, through the inclusion of a selection of responses, illustrates their potential value as research tools for gaining insights into young children’s beliefs about mathematics and learning. It seems that teachers could use the prompts to gain alternate perspectives into children’s beliefs which in turn might inform their instruction.     

‘No offence to God but I don’t believe in Him’: religion,schooling and children’s rights

Since the Children Act 2004 in both England and Wales, schools are expected to give due attention to the issue of children’s rights, particularly respect for the views of pupils in matters that affect them, as outlined in Article 12 of the UNCRC. However, one theme that has been relatively unexplored in the literature on children’s rights and education is religion and the role it plays in everyday school life, an issue that has relevance for Article 12, but also Article 14, which refers to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This article approaches the topic of religion, schooling and children’s rights empirically, through a focus on rural church schools. It draws on in-depth qualitative research with pupils and other stakeholders from two case study schools in order to explore the significance of ethos values and experiences of religious practices for debates in this area.     

Mothers’ and fathers’ well-being, parenting styles, and their children’s cognitive and behavioural strategies at primary school

One-hundred and five 6- to 7-year-old children were given a test measuring their helplessness, failure expectations, task-irrelevant behaviour, lack of persistence and search for social support in a classroom setting in order to examine the impact of parental well-being and parenting styles on the children’s cognitive and behavioural strategies at school. Both parents were also asked to fill in scales measuring their depression, parenting stress and parenting styles. The results revealed that maternal depressive symptomatology was associated with their children’s use of maladaptive strategies, whereas paternal depression was not. Moreover, maternal authoritative parenting styles and authoritarian control, seemed to decrease their children’s use of maladaptive strategies. On the other hand, the more parenting stress reported by the fathers, the more their children showed the use of maladaptive strategies.     

Father involvement in young children’s care and education: exploring boundaries and starting conversations

This paper analyses the impact of a UK local authority initiative – Fathers’ Friday – aiming to involve fathers in their children’s education, which took place in 20 early years’ and primary school settings. Whilst the study involved a range of methods, in this paper interview data associated with practitioners’ perspectives of the initiative are used. Theoretically, Bernstein’s concept of boundary and related notions of classification and framing provide a framework for exploring fathers’ positioning, and Bernstein’s concept of ‘voice’ helps to explain how relations are repositioned, as fathers engage with settings through their participation in the initiative. The authors’ contention is that whilst an existing structure of social relations positions how settings and individuals can relate to one another, experiencing the Fathers’ Friday initiative under changed conditions produces a weakened boundary space for fathers, from which ‘conversations can start’. Children themselves form part of this process of redrawing weakened boundaries.     

Moral disengagement and children’s propensity to tell coached lies

This study investigated the relationship between children’s proneness to endorse moral disengagement mechanisms and their anticipated antisocial lie telling. Participants were 107 predominantly white Australian children in Grade 1 (27 boys, 27 girls; M_age = 6.69 years) and Grade 4 (24 boys, 29 girls; M_age = 9.69 years). Children completed a lie-telling moral disengagement scale and two vignettes. In the first vignette, a child character witnessed a transgression and was coached to say that they did not see the transgression occur (lie type: false denial). In the second vignette, a child character did not witness a transgression and was coached to say that they saw a transgression (lie type: false allegation). In accordance with social cognitive theory predictions, greater proneness to using moral disengagement mechanisms was associated with children’s anticipated lie telling for both false allegations and false denials. These findings highlight the important role of moral disengagement in children’s lie telling.     

Introducing Forum Theatre to elicit and advocate children’s views

Eliciting and advocating the voice of the child remains at the heart of international political agenda and also remains a central role for educational psychologists (EPs). Previous research indicates that EPs tend to use language-based methods for eliciting and advocating views of children. However, these approaches are often limited. Taking a case study approach this paper aims to explain how the use of Forum Theatre offers EPs a legitimate way of eliciting and advocating the views of children. The study worked with seven Year Six children to create a Forum Theatre Performance which was performed in front of the whole school (spect-actors). Focus groups were held with teachers (n = 3) and children (n = 6) from within the school. This study uses a semantic deductive thematic analysis to explain underlying emancipatory processes within the context of a small rural primary school. The results of this study support previous literature demonstrating that Forum Theatre has a wealth of emancipatory processes which might optimise the approach being used to elicit and advocate for the voice of the child. Practical applications and limitations are discussed with some suggestions for further research.     

How to Save the World and Other Lessons from Children’s Environmental Literature

This article argues that most contemporary children’s environmental picture books and easy readers published in the United States focus overwhelmingly on individual environmentalist acts and lifestyle changes, overlook the connections between environmental degradation and systemic social problems such as class disparities, and ultimately over-simplify environmental crisis. They typically encourage children to adopt environmentalist behaviors such as recycling that can be performed by individuals or families in the home, school, and local community, but do little to encourage civic engagement that would call into attention the intertwined ideological, economic, and political factors preventing profound environmental change. The analysis then examines several books that notably do inform readers about the larger political and economic issues and place a strong emphasis on environmental justice, a type of environmentalism deeply concerned with issues of race, class, gender, and economic inequality. Such texts are more likely to encourage an environmentalism that combines lifestyle and consumer choices with political activism. We need more books like this, as children’s texts that resign environmental action almost completely to individual choices and behaviors and disassociate environmental crises from their larger constitutive contexts do little to prepare young people for the socio-environmental challenges we face now and in the future.     

Citizenship and inclusion in the early years: understanding and responding to children’s perspectives on ‘belonging’

This paper argues for, and demonstrates the effectiveness of, including young children in commenting on and improving their learning environments. It reports the experiences gathered from of 16 setting‐based, small‐scale, practitioner‐led projects. Taking a view of citizenship as ‘participation’ the paper shows how practitioner‐research can support the evolution of inclusive environments for all children. Following a critical review of the literature on citizenship, young children, and ‘inclusion’ the paper considers the usefulness of the participant methodology of practitioner action research and the concept of ‘voice’ in educational research and report. Examples of practitioner‐research projects involving children aged three to six years identify and illustrate key themes from the data. Thus, they demonstrate: (1) the range of factors which excited or worried the children; and (2) the ways in which children’s concerns and ideas were listened to and action for change was developed. The children’s ideas and extracts from their comments are included alongside the practitioners’ responses in the cases which are discussed. Four main points are considered in conclusion: (1) children’s views can contribute to the development of inclusive practices; (2) children’s voices are central to studies of their perspectives and the methodological challenges of listening to children’s voices in research must be addressed; (3) identity and self esteem are key to the successful promotion of young children’s positive sense of inclusivity and belonging in their early years settings; and (4) supported practitioner‐research can enhance inclusive early years practices. The paper argues that including children in the identification and exploration of issues important to them promotes a positive sense of inclusivity and that such approaches to developing pedagogies of citizenship and belonging constitute a practical enacting of ‘voice’.