Search

Although scholars have researched Chinese parents' perspectives on play pedagogy, few investigate the differences between parents of preschoolers and early primary schoolers, non-immigrant and immigrant parents. The present study employs the theoretical framework of parental ethnotheories to describe parental understanding and concerns about the use of play in supporting young children's English learning in China. The nine participants included parents of preschoolers and/or primary schoolers who were non-immigrant and immigrant Chinese parents in Canada. Findings revealed different types of discrepancies concerning parental beliefs and practices. First, there was a gap between parents' beliefs and their practices regarding child-rearing and education. Second, in terms of understanding play, Chinese parents held a slightly different perspective compared to that of western parents in other studies, showing that Chinese parents only valued play's supporting role in the development of non-cognitive aspects, such as improving interest in learning English. Third, parents of preschoolers and early primary schoolers held conflicting attitudes toward the use of play in children's learning. Fourth, immigrant Chinese parents were inclined to follow traditional Chinese notions of child-rearing, revealing discrepant perceptions about child play and rearing compared to western knowing of child-rearing in previous studies. The findings raise implications for educators to balance the pedagogical perspectives of child development and parental ethnotheories of child development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prediction of renewable energy consumption structure (RECS) can provide important guidance for energy development planning and energy structure transformation. The RECS refer to the proportion of various renewable energy consumptions and belong to compositional data, which could reflect the structural shapes of a complete system better. The multivariate compositional data's vector autoregressive model (CDVAR) on the basis of the Simplex space and its algebraic system is proposed in this study aiming at the multi-dimensional small sample size. Firstly, the algebraic system of the Simplex space is introduced and the statistics of the compositional data are defined. Secondly, the novel model with the form of the compositional data is obtained and the least square parameter estimation of the model is derived according to Aitchison geometry. Third, the validation of the novel model is verified by the data on RECS in countries (China, USA, and Canada). The validation presents that the proposed model performs better in fitting, prediction, stability, and applicability compared with other five models under transformation. Last, the proposed model is applied to analyze and forecast the RECS of the above countries in 2021–2025 to provide an important basis for the optimization of the RECS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]