Background
In today's society, a growing body of literature attests to the importance of young children's early digital literacy skills in their home environments and how acquisition of these digital ...literacy skills relates to their future learning and digital literacy.
Objectives
Research on young children's digital literacy practices at home was reviewed to explore the positive and negative influences on early learning. This is important due to the children's rapid uptake of online digital technologies over the past decade.
Methods
Peer‐reviewed research articles on home digital literacy practices of children (aged 0–8 years old) published between 2010 and 2021 from four education databases were carefully selected based upon pre‐determined criteria and examined using content analysis.
Results and Conclusion
A high proportion of studies (29 of the 31; 93.5%) demonstrated significant benefits of young children gaining a range of skills, including digital operational, early literacy and language, socio‐emotional, and STEM, through the use of digital technologies at home. Five of the 31 (16.12%) studies reported negative effects of digital technologies in the home context, including distraction, aggressive behaviour, and false self‐confidence. Tablets and smartphone use gained greater momentum in the home context, especially between 2015 and 2021, and there was a positive shift in parental mediation, family involvement, and the children's home digital literacy practices.
Implications
By leveraging children's acquisition of digital literacy skills in the home and taking into account the sociocultural context, we can enhance young children's preparation for the future and provide opportunities for skill development across various learning domains.
Lay Description
What is already known about this topic
The literature shows use of tablets in the home by children have gained momentum.
Parents have different attitudes towards using digital technologies in the home context.
Parents have used different mediation strategies to control, supervise and support their children's home digital literacy practices.
What this paper adds
Within the past decade, parents have extended their mediation strategies to support their children's home digital literacy practices.
Young children move from early digital literacy to proficient digital literacy within the home.
Home digital literacy practices can foster important skills in young children such as language and literacy, operational, socio‐emotional, and STEM.
Artificial intelligence devices such as smart robots are extending children's home digital literacy practices.
Implications for practice and/or policy
Understanding the sociocultural differences of young children can help parents, teachers, and policymakers to facilitate digital literacy skill acquisition.
Fostering young children's basic language literacy, operational, socio‐emotional, and STEM skills through technology use in the home before formal education is essential.
Extending young children's home digital literacy practices to other contexts such as the classroom is necessary.
In the Spring of 2020, COVID-19 forced school buildings to close across the United States. As a result, many early learning programs and elementary schools moved their services online. Families of ...young children with challenging behaviors receiving complex educational and behavioral services in traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms were suddenly required to work closely with educators to support their children’s academic, social-emotional, and behavioral progress. This study used a qualitative approach to examine families’ experiences with children’s challenging behavior, online instruction, and behavior support during COVID-19 school building closures. Findings underscore important themes related to families’ perceptions of child challenging behavior at home, challenges with children’s meaningful participation in online instruction, families’ perceived responsibilities and priorities, and future recommendations. Implications for educators are discussed.
Sensory symptoms are prevalent in autism spectrum disorder but little is known about the early developmental patterns of these symptoms. This study examined the development of sensory symptoms and ...the relationship between sensory symptoms and adaptive functioning during early childhood. Three groups of children were followed across three time points from 2 to 8 years of age: autism spectrum disorder, developmental delay, and typical development. At each time point, parents filled out questionnaires regarding their child’s sensory symptoms and adaptive functioning. At the initial time point, parents of children with autism spectrum disorder reported more sensory symptoms in their children than parents in the typical development group. Parents in the autism spectrum disorder group reported more sensory symptoms than parents in the developmental delay group within smell, taste, and auditory domains. While the typical development group decreased in reported sensory symptoms across the study period, the clinical groups demonstrated no significant change across assessment points. Sensory symptoms for all groups were not independently predictive of adaptive functioning when verbal mental age was also included in the model. The young age range at the initial assessment and pattern of results suggest that sensory symptoms are present early in the etiology of autism spectrum disorder and other developmental disorders and remain stable over time.
Foreign language acquisition from early childhood creates good learning and memorization skills. The earlier a child starts, the better he will learn. Man was born and he is able to acquire many ...knowledge. He sends and repeats a wide range of sounds that have no meaning in his mother tongue. It is not enough to start learning the language early, but the learning process must continue throughout one's life. If we want to make the child bilingual or trilingual, we have to introduce him to foreign languages, as it does not constitute an additional burden because the matter does not mean adding new supplementary materials, but only Programming content to be taught in a foreign language. Recently, some countries restrict the teaching of foreign languages to literary subjects, while others give priority to science subjects. What is the ideal age to learn a foreign language? Is there a golden period for learning? After that period, does learning become ineffective?
This paper examines the implications of various learning-centred initiatives for the relationship between early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions and families in Denmark. Since the ...1990s, promoting early learning has been a key objective for Danish ECEC institutions, reshaping the Danish social pedagogy tradition. Recently, early learning initiatives have become part of the collaboration with parents on so-called home learning. Based on ethnographic studies of such collaboration, I argue that the expansion of dominant early learning agendas from ECEC to families results in an institutionalisation of parenthood. The analysis shows that parents are expected to embrace a learning agenda promoted by ECEC professionals. They are appointed as learning facilitators who must strive to support early learning at home and improve their parenting skills. Furthermore, parents’ engagement in early learning is intertwined with the practical organisation of family life and with ideals of a good family and a good childhood.
Early learning agendas are currently being introduced in early childhood education and care (ECEC) by transnational organizations such as the EU and OECD. In this paper, we focus on Denmark, where ...such agendas interweave with a pedagogical tradition emphasizing a child-centered approach and children's play. Based on ethnographic research, we explore learning agendas as part of practice in ECEC centers, pursuing the situated meanings of a learning program as part of everyday practice in ECEC centers from three different perspectives: of children, professionals and managers. Informed by psychological and anthropological traditions, this design employs an agentic stance and conceptualizes children, professionals and managers as subjects actively contributing to the co-creation, transformation and translation of policies in everyday contexts. Key findings suggest that the appropriation of national and international learning agendas in ECEC settings characterized by local traditions is an ambiguous process. On the one hand, the learning program's structure can support existing professional practices and traditions. On the other hand, the program's focus on learning goals and evaluation practices reduces the focus on pedagogy and supports administrative and political logics, which in turn marginalizes important knowledge about children and their engagements.
While the volume of remote sensing (RS) data is increasing daily, deep learning in Earth observation (EO) faces lack of accurate annotations for supervised optimization. Crowdsourcing projects such ...as openstreetmap (OSM) distribute the annotation load to their community. However, such annotation inevitably generates noise due to insufficient control of the label quality, lack of annotators, frequent changes of the Earth's surface as a result of natural disasters, and urban development, among many other factors. We present adaptively triggered online object-wise label correction (AIO2) to address annotation noise induced by incomplete label sets. AIO2 features an adaptive correction trigger (ACT) module that avoids label correction when the model training under- or overfits, and an online object-wise label correction (O2C) methodology that employs spatial information for automated label modification. AIO2 utilizes a mean teacher model to enhance training robustness with noisy labels to both stabilize the training accuracy curve for fitting in ACT and provide pseudo labels for correction in O2C. Moreover, O2C is implemented online without the need to store updated labels every training epoch. We validate our approach on two building footprint segmentation datasets with different spatial resolutions. Experimental results with varying degrees of building label noise demonstrate the robustness of AIO2. Source code will be available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/AIO2.git .
With increased interest in the early diagnosis and treatment of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), more attention has been called to the motor skills of very young children with ASD. This ...study describes the gross and fine motor skills of a cross-sectional group of 162 children with ASD between the ages of 12 and 36 months, as well as a subset of 58 children followed longitudinally. Gross motor and fine motor age equivalent scores were obtained for all children. A ‘motor difference’ variable was calculated for each child’s gross and fine motor skills by taking the absolute difference of the children’s age equivalent motor score and their respective chronological age. In Study 1 (the cross-sectional analysis), ANCOVA (co-varied for nonverbal problem solving) revealed significant group differences in the gross motor and fine motor age difference variables. Post-hoc analysis revealed that gross motor and fine motor differences became significantly greater with each 6-month period of chronological age. In Study 2, 58 children were measured twice, an average of 12 months apart. Results indicate that the gross motor and fine motor difference scores significantly increased between the first and second measurements. The importance of addressing motor development in early intervention treatments is discussed.
A half century of research details how segregating racial groups in separate schools corresponds with disparities in funding and quality teachers and culturally narrow curricula. But we know little ...about whether young Latino children have entered less or more segregated elementary schools over the past generation. This article details the growing share of Latino children from low-income families populating schools, 1998 to 2010. Latinos became more segregated within districts enrolling at least 10% Latino pupils nationwide, including large urban districts. Exposure of poor students (of any race) to middle-class peers improved nationwide. This appears to stem in part from rising educational attainment of adults in economically integrated communities populated by Latinos. Children of native-born Latina mothers benefit more from economic integration than those of immigrant mothers, who remain isolated in separate schools. We discuss implications for local educators and policy makers and suggest future research to illuminate where and how certain districts have advanced integration.
This study was designed to substantiate the positive, long-term outcomes demonstrated by children from economically disadvantaged homes who received a high-quality, early education. Children who ...attended The Opportunity Project (TOP) Early Learning Centers in a midwestern city in the United States were matched with a like control sample from a local school system and followed from kindergarten through 4th grade. In 3rd and 4th grades, standardized state assessment outcomes for math and reading were collected on the two groups; data also were collected on discipline referrals, attendance rates, and special education placements for all grades. In the 4th grade, the TOP group scored significantly higher on math and reading tests. TOP children had significantly higher attendance rates than the control group; by the 4th grade, TOP students had significantly fewer discipline referrals. TOP students were identified for special education earlier and moved to mainstream classes sooner than the control group. Each year, teachers of TOP graduates completed questionnaires comparing TOP students to the remaining students in their classes on three social variables: appropriate behaviors, social interactions, and emotional maturity. Results indicated TOP children used significantly more appropriate behaviors, were significantly better at social interactions, and were significantly more emotionally mature than their non-TOP peers.
PDF
