Search

Teacher Efficacy (TE) refers to teachers' confidence in their ability to promote student's learning. Research shows that generalist teachers' TE for music education is generally low, with many teachers associating music education with innate musical talents -- a problem exacerbated by music education programmes that focus on singing or playing instruments. Musical play is a form of music education in which young children more or less freely explore and create with sound with limited guidance from a teacher, requiring fewer musical skills. This paper reports on an in-situ professional development program (PD) that focused on musical play as a means of enhancing early years teachers' TE for musical play and for music education in general. For this study, a mixed method exploratory multiple-case study was used. Three early years teams (N = 14) took part in a PD that focused on knowledge and skills related to facilitating musical play. Data were collected through surveys and interviews. Findings demonstrate that taking part in the PD enhanced teachers' TE for musical play and for 50% of the respondents for music education in general. The PD's design features longer duration, collective participation, active learning and qualitative curriculum materials had contributed to teachers' learning.

The study reported in this article investigated the appropriateness of Mathematical Knowledge in Teaching of three pre-service primary school teachers (PSTs), teaching an informal statistical inference (ISI) lesson to primary school students. Using an ISI framework and the Knowledge Quartet framework, the presence and appropriateness of the PSTs' teaching actions were coded and categorized. The results showed that PSTs were consciously engaged in making inferences based on sample data. The PSTs struggled to correctly interpret students' conceptual input and to explain ISI, in particular, how generalizing from a sample is possible. Teacher education should focus on how PSTs can foster students' understanding of the logic of drawing conclusions about a population based on a sample.

School is one of the important educational practices, in which children are actively involved. When we want to contribute to the development of young children's voices, we need deeper insight into the way children act as they do. Therefore, we have to distinguish how young children's voices are composed, as we proclaim that all voices are essentially polyphonic. We found children's expressions which were not corresponding with their own teachers' and parents' expressions. Many of the presented examples of non-corresponding expressions by the children, refer to situations in which resistance, one of the identifiers of voice, is shown. This article is part of a larger study we conducted on young children's voices. In our research we want to explore the content of young children's voices and the meaning they attribute to the educational contexts they are involved in. We conducted five case studies with young children, aged 5-6, in school. We have analyzed their expressions and presented our findings earlier. In this phase of our research project we are looking for possible correspondences between the children's expressions and the expressions of their teachers and parents.

The potential impact of emerging technologies is challenging for construction management researchers to study, as these technologies have yet to become embedded in current organisational practices. Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) offers a method called formative interventions that may assist in this challenge. However, existing formative intervention methods are not adequately tailored to the study of emerging technologies, necessitating a more immersive engagement of the researcher-interventionist. This article proposes a renewed participatory take on the role of the researcher-interventionist and outlines the actions that researchers can undertake to investigate the future impacts of emerging technology. Specifically, we describe the interventionist role through a study of utility detection activities in which we intervened with emerging Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) technology at twelve construction sites. We analysed our role through an inductive coding approach using interviews and field visit data. Our findings reveal five interventionist action types for intervention studies with emerging technology. These include shaping conditions, exposing tensions, supporting problem resolution, operating tools, and facilitating reflection. The action types prompted subjects to reevaluate elements of the activity system and helped describe three potential future activity systems that integrated GPR as a new tool. These findings demonstrate that a participatory take on formative interventions provides a potent means to unveil possible activity systems incorporating emerging technologies. We contribute five formal intervention action types to the literature that equip interventionist researchers with methodological tools to use CHAT in a practice-based study of emerging technologies on construction sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental question in early childhood mathematics concerns the relationship between young children's own informal signs and the formal abstract symbolic language of mathematics. This study presents research investigating the genesis of mathematical semiosis from a Vygotskian cultural-historical (social-semiotic) perspective. In this study we look at the premature stages of dealing with quantity and their relationships. Our aim is to reveal the interweaving of young children's sign-use and to consider the role of intertextuality in mathematisation. Longitudinal, ethnographic data were gathered from case studies of seven children aged 3–4 years in an inner-city nursery school in England, documenting observations of their spontaneous pretend play. The data are interrogated through interpretive analysis and show that some graphical signs moved between individuals' texts, also borrowed from others including the teacher, and woven together. Children's progressive understandings of mathematical sign-use appear to be attained in part through intertextual exchanges in social and culturally meaningful contexts, such as pretend play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rejection by peers has devastating effects on children's social-cognitive development. As language difficulties have been found to be one of the underlying causes of peer rejection, the present study focused on the relation between these two variables. Specifically, this study was the first to test a hypothesized model connecting children's level of receptive vocabulary knowledge to the extent to which they are rejected by their peers, through their ability to communicate effectively. A sample of N = 135 children (aged four to six) participated in the study. Their receptive vocabulary knowledge was assessed with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the level of oral communicative competence was measured using the Nijmegen Test for Pragmatics, and peer rejection was indicated by means of a nomination procedure. Research Findings: Outcomes of mediation analyses revealed that children's receptive vocabulary knowledge was indirectly related to peer rejection, through oral communicative competence: Poor receptive vocabulary knowledge was associated with poor oral communicative competence, which was in turn related to a higher level of peer rejection. Gender was not a significant moderator in this model. Practice or Policy: Findings suggest the need to focus both on oral communicative competence and on receptive vocabulary knowledge when addressing peer rejection in kindergarten.

The ability to reason inferentially is increasingly important in today's society. It is hypothesized here that engaging primary school students in informal statistical reasoning (ISI), defined as making generalizations without the use of formal statistical tests, will help them acquire the foundations for inferential and statistical thinking. Teachers who engage students in ISI need to have good content knowledge of ISI (ISI-CK). However, little is known about the ISI-CK of primary education pre-service teachers. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to describe this knowledge by surveying 722 first-year pre-service teachers from seven teacher colleges across the Netherlands. The survey consisted of five tasks using open-ended questions and true/false statements. The descriptive analysis showed that most respondents understood that descriptive statistics that take the global shape of the distribution into account can be used as arguments within ISI. Although a majority agreed that random sampling is a valid sampling method, distributed sampling was the preferred strategy for selecting a sample. Moreover, when asked to make a generalization beyond the data, most pre-service teachers only described the data and did not appear to understand that a representative sample can be used to make inferences about a population. These findings suggest that it may be useful if statistics education for pre-service teachers places more emphasis on sampling and inference, thereby prompting pre-service teachers to engage in ISI.

Listening to young children's voices is an issue with increasing relevance for many researchers in the field of early childhood research. At the same time, teachers and researchers are faced with challenges to provide children with possibilities to express their notions, and to find ways of comprehending children's voices. In our research we aim to provide a method for listening to, and analyzing young children's voices on educational issues. In this article we describe a new step in our research in which we are dealing with the issues of validity and reliability for the evaluation of our coding system: is our coding system for analyzing young children's voices valid and reliable?

The aims of this article are to document the types of signs that young children make to represent their mathematical thinking, and to determine the extent to which features of usage-based language acquisition are evident in children's early graphical communications made in mathematical contexts. Studies of young children's symbolic principles in ontogeny and research into the acquisition and development of language provide insights into the rich foundational knowledge on which they build their early mathematical inscriptions. The study conceives of children's mathematical abstractions as emergent cognitive representations, originating in their need to communicate within personally meaningful contexts. The collected ethnographic data comprise mathematical inscriptions from seven children aged three to four years in their nursery school and written observations from their teachers and the first researcher. Analysis follows an interpretive, social-semiotic paradigm; the inscriptions were analysed to show how they convey their emerging mathematical understandings, and how this supports their emergent abstractions. The findings illuminate children's strategies as they communicate their thinking, indicating the importance of symbolic number knowledge in acquiring the abstract graphical language of mathematics.

Being rejected by peers has devastating consequences for a child's future social-cognitive development. It is therefore important to investigate factors that contribute to childhood peer rejection. In doing so, the present review specifically focused on sociometric status, a concept that refers to a child's position within the peer group (e.g., liked or disliked). Although previous studies indicated that children's ability to communicate effectively might partly determine their sociometric status, much was still unclear about this relation. Therefore, in the present review, a total of 25 studies into the relation between children's (aged 1 to 12 years) level of oral communicative competence and their sociometric status was systematically reviewed. Results generally pointed to a significant relation between the two variables. Specifically, rejected children communicate less responsive compared with popular children. However, several gaps in previous research were identified, resulting in five recommendations for future studies. First, the complexity of the construct of oral communicative competence asks for an approach in which multiple methods are combined (i.e., mixed methods). Second, future studies should be conducted in non-western countries as well to study possible cross-cultural differences. Third, as the majority of researches were small-scale exploratory studies, future research should include larger samples in order to generalize the findings outside the sample. Fourth, future studies should adopt longitudinal and experimental designs to investigate the direction of the relation of interest. And finally, as previous research showed that the interactional context, gender, and age might influence the relation between oral communicative competence and sociometric status, future studies could take these factors into account.

Musical play is an activity in which young children more or less freely explore and create with sound with limited guidance from a teacher. This study explored the occurrence of musical play in Dutch early years education (4-5 year olds). Twenty early years classroom teachers were interviewed about the content of the music education taking place in their classroom, and about a possible facilitation and guidance of musical play. Findings showed that ten teachers were unfamiliar with musical play, whilst nine experienced it as too difficult due to limited experience and knowledge. One teacher successfully included musical play, due to additional pre-service training. We argue that musical play may be a valuable addition to early years music education, one that enables young children to learn about music more consistent with their age and interests. Based on our outcomes, we advocate the provision of additional teacher education around facilitating musical play.

Language ability plays a major role in children's future development. In the present study, the effect of three interactive reading approaches on children's language ability was investigated through a pre-posttest design. Participants were N = 73 children (aged 4-6) from three early childhood education classrooms. Classrooms were assigned to one of three reading approaches: (1) traditional interactive reading, (2) interactive reading with focused attention, and (3) interactive reading using a mindmap. The hypothesis was that the effect of the mindmap approach would be greater than the effect of the other two reading approaches. Children's productive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, listening comprehension skills, and narrative skills were measured. Results indicated no differences between the effects of the three reading approaches. However, after the intervention period, children's language ability was significantly improved. This indicates that different interactive reading approaches are beneficial for children's language ability, even after a short intervention period of four weeks. Future large-scale, longitudinal research should follow-up on the present study in order to indicate whether the use of mindmaps during interactive reading is even more effective than other reading approaches.

Teachers who engage primary school students in informal statistical inference (ISI) must themselves have good content knowledge of ISI (ISI-CK). However, little is known about how college education for pre-service teachers can contribute to the development of their ISI-CK. To address this shortcoming, we used a case study to investigate ISI-CK development in a class of 21 pre-service primary school teachers who participated in a short intervention (180 min). Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of the pretest, posttest and intervention data, the results suggest that most participants acknowledged it is possible to make uncertain inferences. An assignment to search the media for inferential claims seemed to create awareness regarding inference and the need to distinguish between a sample and a population. A simulation involving random sampling and varied sample size probably increased the participants' knowledge of sampling variability and random sampling. No development was seen in the participants' knowledge about sufficient sample sizes. The statistical investigation conducted by the participants during a model lesson may have strengthened their awareness of ISI, but it also revealed that many participants continued to favour distributed sampling over random sampling. Further research on belief formation with regard to data as evidence, sampling methods and the expression of uncertainty in the context of ISI is needed.

The appropriateness of innovative educational concepts for students from a low socioeconomic status (SES) or ethnic minority background is sometimes called into question. Disadvantaged students are supposed to benefit more from traditional approaches with Programmatic Instruction (PI). We examined Developmental Education (DE), an innovative approach, inspired by Vygotskian theory, in which reading skills are developed through meaningful reading of texts corresponding to students' self-generated problems. The effectiveness of DE is compared to PI in terms of reading comprehension, strategy knowledge, and reading motivation of 4th-grade students; 170 students from ethnic minority or low SES background participated in a pretest-posttest natural 2-group design. Outcomes were similar in both approaches, with one exception: Students with an ethnic minority background in DE performed better on strategy knowledge than similar students in PI. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies on the appropriateness of innovative curricula for disadvantaged students.

One of the missions of education is to prepare children for complex tasks that occur in their cultural environment. By means of abstracting, the effects of this complexity can be reduced. Recent research and theoretical development show us that young children already seem to be able to think abstractly. The acknowledgement of this potential in young children may provide a vehicle for the promotion of more mathematical thinking. In this article, we describe an approach to abstraction that focuses on schematising activities. On the basis of our research, we conclude that young children are able to improve the quality of their abstract mathematical thinking by these means. (Contains 2 figures.)

This study builds on recent research into young children's pretend play. Social literacy practices and events in which children engaged were investigated to reveal features of their meaning making. Drawing on Vygotsky's view of the social nature of symbol use and writing, it stresses the significance of cultural and social features of meanings and literacies within children's play narratives. Data were collected from case studies of seven children aged three to four years in an inner-city maintained nursery school in southwest England, as part of a larger longitudinal ethnographic study. Data comprise written documentation of the children's play and their visual representations, and the analysis follows an interpretive, social semiotic multimodal paradigm. The findings make a compelling case for greater appreciation of pretence as a potentially valuable context for the enculturation of literacies, highlighting the diversity and richness of children's spontaneous meaning making and self-chosen literacy events. Informed by cultural and literacy practices of home and nursery, the children's communications show how meanings and signs are carried across time, space and contexts. Rich and sustained play supported the children's self-initiated literacies in which they explored a heterogeneous range of textual genres, revealing their developing semiotic understandings and expanding repertoire.

Sociocultural theories based on the work of Vygotsky have been increasingly influential in educational sciences. Developmental education (DE) is a pedagogical approach based on Vygotskian theory that has inspired primary schools in the Netherlands to change the learning environment innovatively in a comprehensive way. In this article, we focus on the learning environment for reading comprehension of informative texts in upper-primary grade classrooms in DE. Our aim is to contribute to a more profound understanding of the characteristics of learning environments that are inspired by a Vygotskian approach and that are conducive to reading comprehension of informative texts. Five fourth-grade expert DE teachers participated in a multiple case study aimed at describing and analysing these characteristics for the domain of reading informative texts. Data were collected over a period of six to eight weeks for each teacher and consisted of videotaped interviews, classroom observations and documents. We conclude that DE learning environments are focused on maximising meaning from text for students. This is achieved by organising learning on the basis of emergent goals within students' participation in sociocultural practices.

This article describes the MODEL2TALK intervention, which aims to promote young children's oral communicative competence through productive classroom talk. Productive classroom talk provides children in early childhood education with many opportunities to talk and think together. Results from a large-scale study show that productive classroom talk has a positive effect on young children's oral language abilities. This is of great importance as good oral communicative competence is related to later reading comprehension skills and social acceptance and mediates learning, thinking, and self-regulation. Teachers can promote productive talk in their classrooms by giving children more space to share their ideas, listen to one another, reason, think together, and reflect on their communicative performance. The examples in this article support teachers to adopt productive talk and move toward a classroom culture in which children think and communicate together.

Content-oriented reading interventions that focus on the integration of motivational enhancement and strategy instruction have been found to have positive effects. Developmental education (DE) in the Netherlands is an innovative content-oriented approach in which reading is an integral part of an inquiry-oriented curriculum. Reading for meaning is a central pursuit, and strategy instruction is functionally integrated. This study differs from previous studies in three aspects. Firstly, instead of interventions, two types of existing practices were compared: the DE approach and a textbook-driven programmatic instruction approach (PI). Secondly, this study accounted for classroom influences by conducting multilevel analyses. Thirdly, control variables, i.e. ethnic background, home language, SES, non-verbal IQ, gender, vocabulary and decoding skills, were taken into account. The effects of both approaches were investigated in terms of reading comprehension, knowledge of reading strategies and reading motivation. In a pretest-posttest natural two-group design, tests and questionnaires were administered to 570 grade 4 students in 24 schools. The outcomes that resulted from the DE approach were as good as those from the PI approach. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies that have reported better outcomes of content-oriented reading approaches than traditional and strategy reading approaches.

The present study aims to contribute to the understanding of the effects of music education, in particular music composition as a classroom activity for fifth- and sixth-graders. The intervention (experimental condition) focused on a three-step-model for music composition, based on the Cultural Historical Activity Theory of education, and has been compared with a teacher-centered approach mainly based on students' reproduction of music (control condition). Results indicated that after the six-month intervention period, students in the experimental group were more engaged in music education compared to students in the control group. The research did not show a statistical difference in learning outcomes with regard to intelligence, academic achievement and music achievement, although the students of the experimental group performed better with regard to reading comprehension than their counterparts in the control group. The authors conclude that music composition as a classroom activity is feasible and useful in elementary schools.

Since concepts may have different meanings in different contexts, students have to learn to recontextualise them, i.e. to adapt their meanings to a new context. It is unclear, however, what characteristics a learning and teaching strategy for recontextualising should have. The study aims to develop such a learning and teaching strategy for cellular respiration. The strategy consists of a storyline, consisting of three contexts, with embedded cognitive elements and some episodes focussed on recontextualising cellular respiration. Testing the strategy in two classes in upper secondary biology education showed that the strategy was largely practicable.

In many science education practices, students are expected to develop an understanding of scientific knowledge without being allowed a view of the practices and cultures that have developed and use this knowledge. Therefore, students should be allowed to develop scientific concepts in relation to the contexts in which those concepts are used. Since many concepts are used in a variety of contexts, students need to be able to recontextualise and transfer their understanding of a concept from one context to another. This study aims to develop a learning and teaching strategy for recontextualising cellular respiration. This article focuses on students' ability to recontextualise cellular respiration. The strategy allowed students to develop their understanding of cellular respiration by exploring its use and meaning in different contexts. A pre- and post-test design was used to test students' understanding of cellular respiration. The results indicate that while students did develop an acceptable understanding of cellular respiration, they still had difficulty with recontextualising the concept to other contexts. Possible explanations for this ack of understanding are students' familiarity with the biological object of focus in a context, the manner in which this object is used in a context and students' understanding of specific elements of cellular respiration during the lessons. Although students did develop an adequate understanding of the concept, they do need more opportunities to practice recontextualising the concept in different contexts. Further research should focus on improving the strategy presented here and developing strategies for other core concepts in science.

This study investigated gender differences in the relationship between oral communicative competence and peer rejection in early childhood education. It was hypothesized that children with poorer oral communicative competence would be rejected by their peers more frequently and that the strength of this relationship would differ for boys and girls. A sample of N = 54 children was tested on the Nijmegen Test for Pragmatics (NPT) to measure their oral communicative competence, defined as their ability to use language appropriately in a particular situation. Further, a sociometric method was used to measure the level of peer rejection and peer acceptance. No relationship was found between oral communicative competence and peer rejection. However, a positive relationship was observed between oral communicative competence and peer acceptance. Interestingly, this relationship only applied to boys. It is suggested that early childhood education teachers trying to enhance peer acceptance should take the promotion of oral communicative competence into account.

This paper reports on how teachers, from different cities in Brazil, used groups on Facebook and how communication between teachers and students was affected by using such groups. This study is framed under the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) perspective, and is conceived from a methodological background that invites participants to collaborate during the research. We examined posts from the groups on Facebook from February 2013 to June 2014 by a qualitative approach, together with coding the open-ended qualitative data and comparing their distribution, and analyzed responses to a questionnaire for teachers by the end of the research. Our findings suggest the teachers used the groups for different purposes, which led to an improvement in communication between teachers and students--online and in-classroom--and in students' engagement in the classrooms.

Dynamic Assessment (DA) has received a considerable amount of attention in the educational sciences and beyond. DA combines instruction or feedback with assessment or testing within a single activity. DA has great potential for classroom practices, but has not been implemented in many classrooms yet. In this article, we argue that teacher educators play an important role in implementing DA in classrooms. We describe a specific instrument that can be used for dynamically assessing children's vocabulary development in primary school classrooms. We give examples and present some preliminary results of the implementation of this DA instrument based on experiences in primary education schools in the Netherlands. Furthermore, we use the notion of a trialogical learning process to highlight that the collaboration and interaction between teachers and teacher educators are mediated through tools (i.e., DA instruments and materials) that are further developed and may in the end lead to changes in teaching and assessment practices.

The aim of this study is to uncover the emergence of cultural mathematical understandings and communications in young children's spontaneous pretend play. It is based on Vygotskian cultural-historical perspectives and social-semiotic theory, informed by research into "funds of knowledge" and considers how children's informal knowledge of family practices enriches their play and cultural mathematical understandings. Longitudinal, ethnographic data were gathered in an inner-city mainstream nursery in the south-west of England. Data include written observation and graphics of seven children aged three to four years of age engaged in social pretend play. The findings reveal that many play episodes included aspects of mathematics and that these increased through the year: they show how the children's home cultural knowledge underpinned their pretend play and informed their mathematics. The children's graphicacy to communicate mathematics within their pretend play was also evident. The findings show also that where children are immersed in mathematical- and graphical-rich environments, bridging home and early childhood cultures becomes a natural feature of their pretend play. They will add to our understanding of cultural mathematical knowledge in young children.