Search Results (311)

ToM (ToM) and empathy, integral components of children’s social cognitive development, are shaped by multifaceted factors. The developmental trajectories of ToM and empathy in kindergarten children have long been focal points of inquiry for researchers and educators. Among these determinants, environmental factors emerge as significant predictors of children’s ToM and empathetic abilities. In contemporary society, digital screens have transformed into a ubiquitous medium for kindergarten children, deeply embedded in their daily life, learning, and recreational activities. Consequently, screen exposure has become a novel and distinctive environmental context for childhood development, diverging from traditional settings. This shift raises critical questions that have become focal in recent developmental media research: Does screen exposure correlate with children’s ToM and empathy? And how do key dimensions of screen use (e.g., duration, content) influence the development of these social cognitive skills? To address these queries, this study employed a two-phase experimental approach. Initially, a total of 642 parental questionnaires were collected to comprehensively investigate the current status of digital screen usage among Chinese kindergarten children. Subsequently, the ToM and empathy levels of 126 children were systematically evaluated. The findings revealed that the average daily duration of children’s screen time exhibited a significant negative predictive effect on their ToM level, consistent with prior longitudinal studies that linked early excessive screen exposure to poorer later ToM performance. Conversely, engagement with child-friendly content (e.g., prosocial narratives) and parent–child discussions regarding character emotions during screen exposure (e.g., dialogic questioning while co-viewing) emerged as positive predictors of ToM. Notably, no significant predictive relationships were identified between various dimensions of screen exposure and children’s empathy. This research elucidates the impact of screen exposure on crucial aspects of children’s social cognition, offering practical implications for optimizing screen device utilization to foster children’s holistic development. Full article

Deep learning ability is critical for children’s development, yet little research has been conducted on preschool children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This study investigated the deep learning ability of children with ASD in inclusive play, which involved 8 children with ASD and 13 children with typical development (TD) (5–7 years of age) from four public kindergartens in China. An assessment scale for children’s deep learning ability was developed, and children were observed during inclusive play (IP) and solitary play (SP) in natural settings. A total of 40 play cases (10 were IP and 30 were SP) were collected. Key findings indicated that (1) children with ASD had a moderate level of deep learning ability during play, the emotional experience scored the highest while the interpersonal interaction scored the lowest. (2) The score of deep learning ability in children with ASD in SP was higher than that in IP. (3) Monthly per capita household income, father’s occupation, siblings, and primary playmates significantly influenced the deep learning ability of children with ASD. This study provided new insights into deep learning during play for children with ASD and offered an empirical basis for future inclusive education. Full article

This study examined the impact of early robotics experiences on kindergarten children’s self-efficacy and performance across multiple domains, including building, following visual instructions, problem-solving, and object repair. Ninety-seven children (ages 4–6) were assigned to either a research group (n = 46) receiving a year-long robotics curriculum or a control group (n = 51) following the standard curriculum. A quasi-experimental pre-test–post-test design was employed. Self-efficacy was measured using dichotomous questionnaire items, and performance was assessed through hands-on age-appropriate repair tasks. Baseline comparisons showed no significant differences between groups, supporting equivalence at the start of the study. Results indicated that children who participated in the robotics program reported greater confidence in building, following visual instructions, and solving problems compared to the control group. Importantly, children in the robotics group not only reported greater confidence in their repair abilities but also outperformed peers in the post-test repair task. These findings indicate that early robotics fosters both beliefs of capability and tangible problem-solving skills in early childhood. Embedding robotics into kindergarten curricula may therefore strengthen foundational self-efficacy and support transferable skills relevant for long-term learning and well-being. Full article

Climate change has intensified issues that undermine children’s health, compromise their well-being, and hinder their ability to develop disaster resilience. Disaster education is essential for building disaster resilience among children. As a disaster-prone country, Japan has been developing new approaches to improve disaster education programs, including those in early childhood education, to equip children with the knowledge and skills needed to mitigate risks and respond effectively to disasters. Basic disaster concepts are introduced through hands-on learning, helping children understand key ideas. This paper examines innovations in disaster education, particularly at the kindergarten level, using Bousai Terakoya as a case study. The study reveals that Bousai Terakoya fosters collaboration among schools, communities, and industries to educate kindergarten students about disasters. It emphasizes that protecting oneself and one’s family is a focus of the program, which aims to strengthen future disaster education efforts. This research adds to the discussion on disaster education for children. Active involvement from schools, communities, and industries can help develop strategies to improve the retention of essential disaster concepts in children’s memories. Full article

This article explores the role of the lecturer as a teacher educator in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), drawing on the experiences of former ECEC students. Student perspectives offer valuable insights, especially during times of change and development in the education sector. The study is based on a qualitative, open-ended survey conducted with former ECEC students. Thematic analysis of the data reveals that students greatly value the lecturer’s approach to teaching and highlights the significance of lecturers having personal experience from working in kindergartens. The findings are discussed in light of perspectives on care and love, core values traditionally associated with Norwegian ECEC in relation to children, but perhaps less emphasized in the context of higher education and teacher training. A limitation of the study is the small sample size of 20 participants; however, the aim is not to produce generalizable results, but to offer thoughtful reflections on former students’ experiences and perceptions of the lecturer’s role in ECEC teacher education. Full article

Plate food waste (PFW) in early childhood education is a critical yet understudied issue in Eastern Europe, with implications for nutrition, sustainability, and food security. This study examined PFW in a kindergarten in the Republic of Moldova, encompassing all 58 enrolled children and generating 14,292 meal-level observations through direct weighing of served meals and leftovers. Variance analysis (ANOVA) was used to test the influence of weekday, meal type, age, and gender, while Principal Component Analysis (PCA) explored latent structures of waste determinants. Results showed significant effects of weekday and meal type on PFW, with lunch consistently generating the highest waste levels and snacks the lowest. Gender differences were modest, while the interaction between age and gender indicated heterogeneous developmental patterns in waste behavior. PCA reduced the dataset to three main components: Portion Control, Menu Design, and Serving Strategy, explaining 84.7% of the total variance. These findings provide novel evidence for understanding how contextual and nutritional variables shape children’s PFW in early education and offer a replicable framework for reducing PFW and improving dietary adequacy in kindergartens. The study’s implications extend to sustainable nutrition planning and early behavioral interventions in preschool settings. Full article

In this study, we propose an interactive environment-aware dialog and planning system for social robots in early childhood education, aimed at supporting the learning and social interaction of young children. The proposed architecture consists of three core modules. First, semantic simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) accurately perceives the environment by constructing a semantic scene representation that includes attributes such as position, size, color, purpose, and material of objects, as well as their positional relationships. Second, the automated planning system enables stable task execution even in changing environments through planning domain definition language (PDDL)-based planning and replanning capabilities. Third, the visual question answering module leverages scene graphs and SPARQL conversion of natural language queries to answer children’s questions and engage in context-based conversations. The experiment conducted in a real kindergarten classroom with children aged 6 to 7 years validated the accuracy of object recognition and attribute extraction for semantic SLAM, the task success rate of the automated planning system, and the natural language question answering performance of the visual question answering (VQA) module.The experimental results confirmed the proposed system’s potential to support natural social interaction with children and its applicability as an educational tool. Full article

Spatial reasoning (SR) skills are inherent to our daily interactions with the world and essential to young children’s learning in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) domains. Most simply, SR skills allow humans to mentally represent and transform objects and their relations. While the connection between SR skills and mathematics achievement is strong, the skills are infrequently emphasized in curriculum or instruction in the early grades of traditional elementary schools. The Regio-Emilia Inspired Approach (RE-IA) offers a schooling model that promotes teachers, or guides, to engage children in authentic learning opportunities and co-construct an emergent curriculum suited to their learning goals, which offers opportunities to learn and practice SR skills through interactive engagements. In this study, we sought to understand and identify specific ways of designing and implementing mathematics activities that support children in receiving opportunities to learn SR skills, whether they are explicit within learning objectives or implicit in learning actions students take. We examined lessons that offer opportunities to integrate SR within a kindergarten mathematics project targeting data analysis concepts. Findings revealed RE-IA as one pedagogical approach to including SR in early childhood education, which could help educators provide engaging environments and joyful mathematics learning experiences for young children. Implications for practice and directions for future research aimed more broadly at transdisciplinary STEAM and in other school models are discussed. Full article

Background/Objectives: Increased screen time partially replaces social interaction, physical activity, and outdoor play in kindergarten children, leading to a risk of decreased cognitive, emotional, and motor skills. Children with high motor skills are more likely to have access to challenging joint activities that promote their cognitive and emotional development. This study examines the moderating role of motor competence in the relationship between executive function skills and emotion comprehension. Methods: A sample of 220 kindergarten children (101 girls, 119 boys) completed the NEPSY-II subtests and the ‘Dimensional Change Card Sort’ tool for executive function skills assessment, the Movement Assessment Battery for Children—Second Edition (MABC-2) for motor competence, and the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) for emotion comprehension. Executive function skills and motor competence were assessed when children were in their penultimate year of kindergarten (children were aged on average 5 years 10 months), and emotion comprehension was assessed one year later, when children were in their final year of kindergarten. When children were in their penultimate year of kindergarten, caregivers also reported on children’s passive and active screen time, maternal education, and family income, which were used as control variables. Results: For girls, motor competence moderated the relationship between cognitive flexibility and later emotion comprehension. High motor competence amplified this relationship (B = 0.171; SE = 0.066; 95% CI [0.041, 0.302]; p = 0.011). For boys, there were no significant moderation effects. Conclusions: High motor competence can improve emotion comprehension in kindergarten girls. Emotional development may benefit from effective shared motor interventions for children. Full article

This study investigates the integration of learning theories with personalized technologies, focusing on the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in reading instruction. Its primary aim is to conduct a systematic literature review of research employing AR to support readers with the complexities of the reading process. The review focuses on literacy development in children from kindergarten through age twelve, encompassing both typically developing readers and those with reading difficulties. It is suggested that AR can contribute to inclusive education by offering adaptable and engaging learning experiences that meet diverse learner needs. Guided by clearly defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, the study analyzes key elements of research design, the types of AR technologies utilized, and the educational outcomes reported. Furthermore, it critically examines the limitations of the current body of evidence in this field. Full article

This study addresses the challenge of promoting sustainable organizational change in educational settings by focusing on the early identification of systemic contradictions within a kindergarten prior to a Change Laboratory intervention. Grounded in cultural historical activity theory, the research aims to develop and test an interview-based approach for surfacing discursive manifestations of contradictions among diverse staff members. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers, special teachers, janitors, and cooks and analyzed using the framework of Engeström and Sannino to identify and categorize the types of contradictions present. Results reveal a range of discursive manifestations, particularly dilemmas (5), conflicts (56), and critical conflicts (18), especially among teachers and special teachers, highlighting two secondary contradictions between different elements of the activity system. The first contradiction relates to the instruments and the object, while the other is between the rules and the object. By reconstructing these contradictions and representing them graphically, the study provides a foundation for the Change Laboratory, enabling participants to engage more effectively with the most pressing issues. The findings suggest that this preparatory analysis not only supports the facilitation of collective problem-solving but also enhances the sustainability of organizational change by addressing root causes and fostering shared ownership among staff. Full article

Background/Objectives: Time spent with parents and educators encompasses a large portion of a child’s waking hours, with the home and early childhood education and care serving as two of the first settings in which children develop social and cognitive abilities. While previous studies have used social and cognitive tests to examine antecedents of child behavior, we extend such studies to take into account the congruence and incongruence of parents’ and teachers’ views on those antecedents. We examine the importance of parent-teacher alignment on the perceptions of a child’s personality and abilities in early development. Methods: Parents and teachers of 2968 German Kindergarten-aged (4–5 years old) children were surveyed using the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). Parents and teachers independently rated 10 child behavioral traits, with higher scores indicating more prosocial behavior. Educators also rated children on five developmental abilities (social abilities, ability to concentrate, language abilities, general knowledgeability, and mathematical reasoning) compared to the student’s peers. While previous work has often examined how parental investments in children or teachers’ views of children might be related to development, we provide a new take by examining parents and teachers in conjunction with each other. Research that has looked at both parents and teachers has tended to examine alignment, or lack thereof, on child behaviors and personality traits. We analyzed child developmental abilities using OLS regression models, measures of parent–teacher divergences in ratings of child behavior, and demographic controls. Results: Greater differences in parent and teacher perceptions of desire for knowledge were negatively associated with all five developmental abilities. Differences in parent and teacher perceptions on talkativeness, confidence, good-naturedness, and understanding were negatively associated with at least one developmental outcome. By contrast, differences in perceptions of children’s neatness were positively associated with all five developmental abilities. Conclusions: Using both parent and teacher perceptions of child behaviors and abilities is a unique approach to understanding the relevance of parent and educator perceptions to a child’s development. Our findings indicate the need for collaboration across young children’s home and school or care settings. Establishing congruence in perceptions and the kinds of relationships that can lead to such congruence can help children with behavioral issues receive support in both home and educational settings and encourage mutual respect and partnership between parents and educators. Full article

In 2023, the authors conducted a qualitative study in five bilingual educational institutions (two general education schools and three kindergartens) in Tartu, Estonia, undergoing a transition to Estonian-medium education. The empirical material for this qualitative research was collected during ten discussion evenings with Russian L1 parents, with around 300 attendees. Given the emotional and political sensitivity of the topic, the discussions were documented through researchers’ handwritten field notes and subsequently reconstructed from these notes for thematic analysis following the principles of qualitative content analysis. This study aimed to map the concerns and fears of Russian L1 parents and to collaboratively explore possible solutions. The broader objective was to understand and interpret Russian-speaking parents’ attitudes toward the shift to Estonian-medium instruction. A further aim was to raise language awareness among parents and to help lay a more positive foundation for the transition process. The theoretical framework draws on the notion that parents’ language attitudes significantly influence their children’s perceptions of the value of the language being learned. Our results show that many Russian L1 parents in Tartu consider it important for both Estonian- and Russian-speaking children to study in a shared, Estonian-medium learning environment. At the same time, parents identified several key challenges, including concerns about a decline in education quality, increased academic pressure and stress for children learning in a non-native language, a lack of suitable learning materials, and parents’ limited ability to assist with homework due to their own insufficient proficiency in Estonian. Full article

Despite the positive impact of culturally responsive social emotional learning (CR-SEL) in enhancing students’ academic achievement and emotional resilience, less is known about how it is employed in rural school settings. We employed a case study design to explore how rural transitional kindergarten (TK) teachers in California practice CR-SEL in their classrooms. Ten TK teachers from seven California rural schools were individually interviewed online. Results of the thematic analysis showed three major themes of CR-SEL practices: multicultural and critical perspective development, inclusive environment, and family engagement. Participants identified different strategies to teach CR-SEL practices in their classrooms. Findings extend our understanding of CR-SEL in practice, and provide practical and research implications for school psychologists, educators, and policymakers. Full article

Given the importance of plants for ecosystem functioning, sustainability, and human well-being, children should be introduced to local species as early as possible. This study investigated whether kindergarten children (n = 24) can acquire knowledge of trees through a motion-based educational game and a subsequent half-day excursion. During the game, illustrations of trees were shown, their names were called out, and the children were asked to perform certain movements relating to features/names of the trees they had practiced. In semi-structured interviews directly after the activities and three months later, the children were asked to identify the trees by their leaves and to provide reasons why they had remembered their names. Already, after playing the game for four weeks, species with large and iconic leaves such as Norway maple (Acer platanoides) were correctly identified in nature by about 80% of the children. The interviews showed that even after three months, children correctly identified more than half of the species presented. They recognized the trees by their shape and the texture of their leaves but also by remembering the corresponding movements. The combination of motion-based play and hands-on, sensory investigations can be recommended to promote plant knowledge right from kindergarten age. Full article