New concepts of play and the problem of technology,digital media and popular-culture integration with play-based learning in early childhood education

Technology, digital media and popular culture form an important aspect of young children’s life-worlds in contemporary post-industrial societies. A problem for early childhood educators is how to most effectively integrate these aspects of children’s life-worlds into the provision of play-based learning. Traditionally, research has considered barriers to teacher uptake of technologies in the early years, or teacher beliefs and attitudes about using technologies with young children. An alternative perspective focuses on children’s play as the foundation for early childhood curriculum provision and argues that what is needed instead are ‘new’ concepts of play more appropriate for explaining children’s contemporary play experiences in post-industrial societies. This article examines the influence of a new concept of play called ‘web-mapping’ on teachers’ curriculum practices in early childhood education, and finds that, according to Vygotsky’s ideas about explicit and implicit mediation, new concepts of play are likely to provide a fruitful avenue for addressing the ‘problem’ of technology, digital media and popular-culture integration in early childhood education.     

Delayed matching in the pigeon: Interference produced by the prior delayed matching trial

Pigeons’ delayed matching performance on Trial n was examined as a function of whether the correct and incorrect comparison stimuli from Trial n?1 were maintained in the same role on Trial n (positive transitions), were reversed in role on Trial n (negative transitions), or were absent on Trial n (neutral transitions). Relative to neutral transitions, positive transitions did not significantly facilitate performance. Negative transitions, however, produced significant proactive interference on Trial n, and the magnitude of proactive interference was greater when the Trial n retention interval was 1 sec than when it was 0 sec. As the intertriai interval increased from 2 to 10 sec, the amount of interference dissipated. The results suggest that a prior delayed matching trial can serve as a significant source of forgetting but not a significant source of facilitation on an immediately following delayed matching trial.     

Control of pigeons’ matching and mismatching performance by instructional cues

Pigeons were trained on a two-stimulus-shape (a plus and a circle) complex conditional discrimination that required birds to match sample and comparison stimuli on some trials and to mismatch on other trials, depending on the level of chamber illumination (bright or dark). Following acquisition, the birds were transferred to a novel color (red and green) task. For half of the birds, the contingenties between levels of illumination and the match/mismatch response requirements were consistent with training (nonreversal condition). For the remaining birds, the contingencies between levels of illumination and match/mismatch response requirements were the opposite of those established in training (reversal condition). Birds in the nonreversal condition acquired the color match/mismatch task at a significantly faster rate than birds in the reversal condition. These results indicate that relation-based responding (generalized matching/ mismatching) is subject to discriminative control.     

Pedagogical practices: examining preservice teachers’ perceptions of their abilities

Teachers routinely make decisions regarding the best pedagogical methods for altering students’ understandings about academic content. Such practices are at the root of teaching as persuasion, and have been shown to be related to academic achievement. Yet very little research has investigated the extent to which individuals learning to be teachers (i.e., preservice teachers) feel they are capable of performing the practices underlying teaching as persuasion. As such, the purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which preservice teachers see themselves as capable of performing persuasive pedagogical practices compared to more general teaching practices as operationalized on well-researched measures of teacher efficacy. Results indicated that undergraduates enrolled in preservice teacher education courses perceived themselves as less capable of performing persuasive pedagogical practices than more generally accepted practices. In addition, preservice teachers perceived they were more capable of altering students’ knowledge about content than at modifying their beliefs about content. Implications for research and practice are forwarded.     

Writing instruction in kindergarten: examining an emerging area of research for children with writing and reading difficulties

This review examines the literature on how to teach kindergarten children with reading and writing difficulties how to write. Specifically, research on handwriting instruction, spelling instruction, and composition writing is discussed. Due to the limited number of empirical studies on writing that included kindergarten students with diagnosed reading and writing difficulties, selected studies conducted with the full range of kindergarten children, as well as studies conducted in the early elementary grades, are presented to highlight future directions for research.     

Boys as writers: perspectives on the learning and teaching of writing in three primary schools

Boys' attitude to writing is widely perceived as an issue in English primary and secondary schools. Prior research has identified a link between negative attitudes to writing and lower achievement and raised the issue of the stereotyping of boys as underachievers in literacy. The study reported here suggests that if we are to understand the problems associated with the underachievement of boys, we should take into account boys' perspectives on their experiences as literacy learners. In this study, boys aged 8–11 drawn from three London schools in the UK, were interviewed in small groups annually over 3 years of their primary schooling. The boys' teachers were also interviewed separately. These interviews generated insights into the teachers' views of the boys and the boys' views of themselves as literacy learners, especially as writers. The data indicated the boys were highly sensitive to the social situation in the classroom. The boys responded best to their literacy learning when their teachers treated them as individuals, valued their ideas and incorporated strategies for developing learner agency into their daily classroom practice. This article concludes that a teaching approach that includes consulting children about what helps or hinders their learning and a fresh teacher focus on gender issues would increase gender awareness.     

Integrating diversity,equity, and inclusion principles into instruction: Case studies from the University of Florida's Health Science Center Libraries

Librarians at the University of Florida Health Science Center Libraries have begun to intentionally incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles into teaching during design, implementation, and evaluation. This article uses four case studies to provide an overview of the librarians' approaches to inclusive teaching (1) an annual workshop for Physical Therapy students on the intersection between DEI, health literacy, and patient education; (2) a librarian-taught one-credit course for public health students, which was revised to create a more inviting syllabus and integrate elements of universal design; (3) an annual project for first year medical students highlighting health disparities and community resources; and (4) piloting the application of critical librarianship principles in library standalone sessions on database searching and reference management. Suggestions are provided for other librarians who are interested in developing a culture of inclusive teaching in their own libraries.     

Monitoring the pathways and outcomes of people from disadvantaged backgrounds and graduate groups

The development of a strong and vibrant knowledge economy is linked directly to successful learning outcomes among university graduates. Building evidence‐based insights on graduate outcomes plays a particularly important role in shaping planning and practice. To this end, this paper analyses some key findings from the Graduate Pathways Survey, the first national study in Australia of bachelor degree graduates' outcomes five years after course completion. It focuses on the outcomes of graduates from disadvantaged groups, people of particular significance in an expanding and increasingly important higher education system. After advancing the rational for this analysis, the paper sketches the overall research approach. The paper continues with an analysis of education and employment outcomes for the target groups, and concludes by summarising implications for building further research insights.     

Children learning to use technologies through play: A Digital Play Framework

Digital technologies are increasingly acknowledged as an important aspect of early childhood education. A significant problem for early childhood education has been how to understand the pedagogical use of technologies in a sector that values play‐based learning. This paper presents a new framework to understand how children learn to use technologies through play. The Digital Play Framework is based on the sociocultural concept of tool mediation and Corrine Hutt's work regarding epistemic and ludic activity as basis for understanding play. The Digital Play Framework presents a series of indicators for how children learn to use technologies as cultural tools, first by exploring the functionality of technologies through epistemic activity, and second by generating new content through ludic activity.