Search

Drawing on Bakhtin's (Discourse in the novel, University of Texas Press, 1981) notions of dialogism and appropriation, this case study explored how a 5-year-old Latina named Lucia negotiated the gender discourses involved in designing and building robots. The study findings revealed that Lucia performed her gender by appropriating different gender discourses and by using both robotics knowledge and gender tactics to position herself as a competent robotics engineer. Lucia's fluid gender performativity combined with her skillful robot design legitimized her entry into the masculine peer group while affirming her robot as an empowered agent. This study unpacks the complexity of gender ideologies that female students may experience as they engage in the engineering design process. The study also shows how robot designing and building can be a technological and material practice through which young girls can explore and express fluid gender subjectivities. We conclude the article with implications for early childhood engineering and robotics education.

The purpose of this study is to develop and validate self-directed learning ability test (SDLAT) for elementary school students considering the theoretical consistency. A total of 507 students of 5th and 6th-grade elementary students in Seoul, Korea were participated in this research. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS WIN 23.0 and AMOS WIN 22.0 programs. The data of 200 were used for exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and 307 data were used for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The conclusions were as follows: An SDLAT for elementary school students was developed and validated in this study. The domain of self-directed learning ability was classified into three domains of cognition, affective, and behavior. The sub-factors for each domain and 42 items were developed and then verified for its validity (NFI 0.824, IFI 0.906, CFI 0.905, RMSEA 0.043). The sub-factors of the cognitive domain were identified as 'cognitive thinking,' 'metacognition,' and 'problem solving.' The affective domain included 'intrinsic motivation,' 'future-oriented motivation,' and 'self-efficacy.' The behavioral domain had 'seeking help,' 'managing physical environment,' and 'time management.' The reliability of the total items of the test was Cronbach [alpha] 0.944.

The provision of childcare has been prioritized by the South Korean government as a primary means of decelerating the dropping fertility rate and boosting women's employment by reducing the childrearing burden. Drawing on a Bakhtinian perspective, this study examined how discourses on professionalism and the professional identities of the childcare workforce are constructed in dialogic relation to the nation's childcare policies. A total of 18 childcare practitioners and mothers participated in qualitative interviews about the professionalism of the childcare workforce. The study revealed that the participating childcare practitioners and mothers valued emotional and relational caring as a core element of childcare professionalism, while simultaneously recognizing childcare as a job stigmatized by both low qualifications and poor working conditions. We discuss how these discourses on the professionalism of the childcare workforce both stand in tension with and appropriate the early childhood education and care policies in Korea.

This paper draws on data from an ongoing study on pre-service (PS) teachers' perceptions of early childhood/elementary classrooms, conducted during a university course on arts and creativity in early childhood education (ECE). The study focuses on PS teachers' perspectives on arts and material pedagogies in ECE classrooms via pre- and post-class drawings of an ideal classroom and written reflections. The findings reveal that PS teachers' perceptions of and experience with materials and environment in the classroom may have a direct influence on ways they incorporate materials and environment in their future pedagogies. The study also shows ways in which university coursework and field experiences both compliment and come into tension with one another. We conclude with implications for early childhood/elementary teacher education.

This qualitative case study explores a 6-year-old boy's dialogic appropriation of programmable robots. The study was conducted in two robotics education programs for children aged four to seven. Drawing on Bakhtin's (1981) notion of appropriation, we found that the focal child actively engaged with the programmable robots by (1) transforming the given features of the robots, (2) hybridizing the programming practice with the ordinary practices of his peer culture and (3) constructing his own perspective on the agency of robots and the meaning of programming. We argue that the ways in which the focal child engaged with the programmable robots went beyond mere adoption of the robots but rather took the form of dialog.

Background: A careful approach is required when providing nutritional support to patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). This study investigated whether implementing a multidisciplinary nutritional support team (NST) is associated with improved survival outcomes in patients with ARDS. Methods: In a nationwide population‐based cohort study, all adult patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) in South Korea with a primary diagnosis of ARDS from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2021, were included. The NST comprised four professionals (physicians, full‐time nurses, full‐time pharmacists, and full‐time clinical dietitians). Patients admitted to ICUs with and without the NST system were allocated to the NST and non‐NST groups, respectively. Results: The analysis comprised a total of 15,555 patients with ARDS. Among them, 6615 (42.5%) were in the NST group, and 8940 (57.5%) were in the non‐NST group. After adjusting for covariates in the multivariable logistic regression, the NST group showed a 19% lower 30‐day mortality than the non‐NST group (odds ratio: 0.81, 95% confidence interval: 0.75–0.87, p <.001). Furthermore, after adjusting for covariates in multivariable Cox regression, the NST group showed a 12% lower 1‐year all‐cause mortality than the non‐NST group (hazard ratio: 0.88, 95% confidence interval: 0.85–0.92, p <.001). Conclusions: NST implementation was associated with enhanced 30‐day and 1‐year survival rates in patients with ARDS. These findings indicate that nutritional support provided by the NST may influence the survival outcomes of patients with ARDS in the ICU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pioneering the use of the Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer's (GEMS) observation data in air quality modeling, we adjusted Asia's NOx emissions inventory by leveraging the instrument's unprecedented sampling frequency. GEMS tropospheric NO2 columns served as top-down constraints, guiding our Bayesian inversion to constrain NOx emissions in Asia during spring 2022. This enabled the model to better capture the diurnal variation in NOx emissions, such as its morning rush hour peak, particularly when more retrievals were available each day, improving the simulation accuracy to a certain extent. The GEMS-informed adjustment reduced the extent of model underestimation of surface NO2 concentrations from 17.38 to 5.58% in Korea and from 13.05 to 4.54% in China, showing about 9.40% and 5.77% greater improvements, respectively, compared to the adjustment based on the sun-synchronous low earth orbit observation proxy. Our findings highlight the potential of geostationary observation data in refining the diurnal cycle of inventoried NOx emissions, thereby more effectively improving the accuracy of air quality simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study focused on the robotics learning process of Mark (a pseudonym), a Latino-American second grader diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Drawing on Polanyi's (Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy [Kindle version], 1958/2015) notion of "tacit knowing" and "dwelling in tools," we attempted to understand Mark's unique processes and ways of engaging in learning about a Light Sensor by pursuing two research questions: (a) How does Mark, with his unique behavioral and socio-emotional characteristics, engage in the robotics class? (b) What insights can we gain from his inquiry as we develop responsive robotics education? Findings revealed that Mark used a non-sequential inquiry process filled with repetitive free explorations and unexpected expanded inquiries about the Light Sensor. This non-sequential inquiry process highlighted that dwelling with robotic manipulatives was Mark's distinct ways of exploring the Light Sensor. His non-sequential inquiry process emerged from his tacit engagement and expanded to his sophisticated and holistic understanding of the Light Sensor. We discuss implications for a robotics education program that is responsive to young children with diverse needs and characteristics.

Research on early childhood robotics education often focuses narrowly on teaching young children STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) concepts and skills. In this qualitative case study, our research team examined what happened when we worked with young children (age 7) and combined the technologies of robotics education with an inquiry approach, that is, an opportunity for students to collaboratively identify a problem arising from their own lived experiences and build a robot to solve it. We found that the process of children's problem identification was dialogic, not only with peers and teachers but also with materials, as they defined and refined problems based on interactions with peers and objects. As this study was conducted at an economically disadvantaged public school in the Southern United States, we argue that early childhood robotics education has a great potential to engage young children in STEM learning in a personally meaningful manner and that an instructional approach fostering children's inquiry and project-based learning through their problem finding and problem posing is effective in making STEM accessible to students from diverse backgrounds.

Through nine months of ethnographic observations and video-cued child interviews, this study explored two Korean immigrant children's perspectives on friendship in U.S. preschools. The study was framed by Bakhtinian dialogism and revealed that, compared to their teachers, who tended to identify friendship by observing the frequency of peer interactions, the participating children recognized friendship through qualitative features of relationships, such as sharing non-verbal and verbal communication, respecting ongoing play activities, and offering mutual assistance. This manuscript highlights the importance of considering what cultural- and linguistic-minority children pursue in a friendship when designing pedagogical strategies for encouraging positive peer relationships.

Data fusion of aerosol optical depth (AOD) datasets from the second generation of the Geostationary Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite (GEO-KOMPSAT-2, GK-2) series was undertaken using both statistical and deep neural network (DNN)-based methods. The GK-2 mission includes an Advanced Meteorological Imager (AMI) aboard GK-2A and a Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) and Geostationary Ocean Color Imager II (GOCI-II) aboard GK-2B. The statistical fusion method, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), corrected the bias of each aerosol product by assuming a Gaussian error distribution and accounted for pixel-level uncertainties by weighting the root-mean-square error of each AOD product for every pixel. A DNN-based fusion model was trained to target AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) AOD values using fully connected hidden layers. The MLE and DNN AOD outperformed individual GEMS and AMI AOD datasets in East Asia (R = 0.888; RMSE = - 0.188; MBE = - 0.076; 60.6 % within EE for MLE AOD; R = 0.905; RMSE = 0.161; MBE = - 0.060; 65.6 % within EE for DNN AOD). The selection of AOD around the Korean Peninsula, which incorporates all aerosol products including GOCI-II, resulted in much better results (R = 0.911; RMSE = 0.113; MBE = - 0.047; 73.3 % within EE for MLE AOD; R = 0.912; RMSE = 0.102; MBE = - 0.028; 78.2 % within EE for DNN AOD). The DNN AOD effectively addressed the rapid increase in uncertainty at higher aerosol loadings. Overall, fusion AOD (particularly DNN AOD) showed improvements with less variance and a negative bias. Both fusion algorithms stabilized diurnal error variations and provided additional insights into hourly aerosol evolution. The application of aerosol fusion techniques to future geostationary satellite projects such as Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO), Sentinel-4, and Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) may facilitate the production of high-quality global aerosol data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how a brief project-based unit promoted the learning of children in a first-grade classroom. The children attended a public elementary school located in a southeastern university town in the United States. Approximately 94% of the students in the school were from economically disadvantaged families. No children in this classroom were Caucasian, and most of them came from single-parent households. We compared the children's learning and performance in a teacher-directed science unit on animals versus a project-based unit on chicks. Results revealed that more state-mandated objectives were covered during the project-based unit than during the teacher-directed unit and that children had "more to say" by using more words and expressing more specific and accurate ideas after the project-based instruction. The project also provided more enriched learning opportunities than the traditional teacher-directed unit. Implications for early childhood teacher education are included.

The idea of learning through projects has a long history in the field of education in general, and in early childhood education in particular. Many educators provide guidelines on how to approach project work with children and assert its benefits in various areas of children's learning and development. Yet few empirical studies investigate what parents think about their children's learning through projects. In this case study, we intend to fill this gap by exploring parents' perspectives of the project approach in a second grade classroom in which a majority of the students were from low-income families. Our analysis revealed the parents' undisputed positive perceptions of project work, which overall included (a) increasing motivation, (b) building a community of learners, (c) utilizing children's strength, (d) improving academic achievement, and (e) encouraging parent involvement. We conclude with implications for early childhood research and practice, particularly for collaboration between teachers and parents. (Contains 1 figure.)

Drawing on Latour's (Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor--network-theory, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005), this manuscript discusses a study of a robotics class in a public, Title I elementary school. Compared with theoretical frameworks (e.g., constructivism and constructionism) dominant in the field of early childhood robotics education, the lens of ANT served to move beyond emphasizing a single element (i.e., either robotic tools or children's work with teachers and parents) to seeing heterogeneous associations of multiple elements involved in robotics education. In these associations, human and non-human elements greatly contributed to implementing robotics activities. In particular, our analysis of three second-graders, who successfully met the instructional objectives set by our research team, revealed critical roles played by material actors (e.g., robotic manipulatives, engineer logs) and quasi-human/quasi-material actants (e.g., embodied simulation) in these children's learning and performance. The findings of this study encourage educators to pay careful attention to multiple elements, including instructional materials and children's bodily exploration, associated with teaching and learning.