Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children acquire causal ...knowledge from storybooks, and whether children are sensitive to how closely the fictional world resembles reality. Preschoolers (N = 108) listened to stories in which a novel causal relation was embedded within realistic or fantastical contexts. Results indicate that by at least 3 years of age, children are sensitive to the underlying causal structure of the story: Children are more likely to generalize content if the fictional world is similar to reality. Additionally, children become better able at discriminating between realistic and fantastical story contexts between 3 and 5 years of age.
This study examined the stability and growth over a 3-year period of individual differences in preschool children's social competence, which was assessed in three domains: social ...engagement/motivation, profiles of behavior and personality attributes characteristic of socially competent young children, and peer acceptance. A total of 255 children (126 girls and 129 boys) participated in this study. Growth curve analyses demonstrated both stability and change with regard to social competence over early childhood. Social competence measures and latent variables were invariant over this time period, individual differences in social competence were largely stable from year to year, and significant increases over time were observed for the domain most closely reflective of specific personal attributes skills.
Young preschoolers rapidly acquire new information from social partners but do not learn efficiently from people on video. We trained parents to use Whitehurst's dialogic reading questioning ...techniques while watching educational television with their children. Eighty-one parents coviewed storybook videos with their 3-year-old children in 1 of 4 conditions: dialogic questioning (pause, ask questions, and encourage children to tell parts of the story), directed attention (pause and comment but do not ask questions), dialogic actress (show the videos with dialogic questioning by an on-screen actress embedded in them), or no intervention (show the videos as usual). After 4 weeks, children in the dialogic questioning group scored higher than children in the directed attention and no-intervention groups on story comprehension and story vocabulary measures. Scores from the dialogic actress group fell in between. On a standardized measure of expressive vocabulary, children in the 2 parent-interaction groups exhibited significant improvement over their pretest scores. Results indicate that parent-led questioning enhances children's learning from video stories at age 3 and that a video incorporating an on-screen dialogic questioner may also be effective. Mechanisms behind the effect of dialogic reading-style interventions are discussed.
This study investigated the development of sharing expectations and sharing behavior in 3 groups of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. We examined (a) whether preschool children expect a person to ...share more with a friend than with a disliked peer and (b) whether their expectation about others' sharing behavior depends on whether there is a cost or not. Additionally, (c) we assessed children's own sharing behavior toward the different recipients in the same situation. The results show that expectations about sharing and actual sharing follow similar developmental pathways and that recipient-dependent sharing and sharing expectations emerge around 4 years of age. Moreover, individual-level analyses provide evidence that by 5 years of age, children's own sharing and their expectations of others' sharing are closely related to each other.
Head Start (HS) is the largest federally funded preschool program for disadvantaged children. Research has shown relatively small impacts on cognitive and social skills; therefore, some have ...questioned its effectiveness. Using data from the Head Start Impact Study (3-year-old cohort; N = 2,449), latent class analysis was used to (a) identify subgroups of children defined by baseline characteristics of their home environment and caregiver and (b) test whether the effects of HS on cognitive, and behavioral and relationship skills over 2 years differed across subgroups. The results suggest that the effectiveness of HS varies quite substantially. For some children there appears to be a significant, and in some cases, long-term, positive impact. For others there is little to no effect.
Kern des Kartensets ist es, das Konzept »Kinder als Akteure« im Zusammenspiel von Kita und Gesellschaft zu thematisieren und dabei auf grundlegende Ambivalenzen in Kitas, im Verhältnis von Kitas zu ...Familien und in Bezug auf die gesellschaftliche Positionierung von Kindern einzugehen. Das Bild vom aktiven Kind bildet die Grundlage der Bildungsarbeit in Kitas. Das Kartenset führt in Konzepte (wie Diskriminierung, Wohlbefinden, Armut, Adultismus, Generationale Ordnung, etc.) sowie Ergebnisse und Perspektiven der sozialwissenschaftlichen Kindheitsforschung ein. So wird der eigene Blick erweitert auf Kinder als Akteure in Kita und Gesellschaft. Wie Kinder aus unterschiedlichen Positionen heraus (z.B. als Mädchen, als migrantisches Kind, als sozial benachteiligtes Kind) zu Akteuren ihres Alltags werden, wird an Beispielsituationen aus der Kita-Praxis aufgezeigt. Ausführliche Reflexionssets zu Kindern als Akteuren von Zusammenarbeit, Kinderkultur, Partizipation, Bildung, Familie, Raum und Übergängen laden dazu ein, diesen Blickwechsel im konkreten Praxisbezug zu erproben. Das Kartenset eignet sich daher für Studium, Aus-, Fort- und Weiterbildung von Pädagog:innen ebenso wie für das Selbststudium und Reflexionen in Kita-Teams.
Babies in Groups Bradley, Ben S; Selby, Jane; Stapleton, Matthew
2024, 2024-01-18
eBook
Odprti dostop
Babies in Groups examines the consequences for science, for childcare policy, and for adult psychotherapy, of findings that young babies capably enjoy participating in groups. The authors’ research ...on preverbal infants’ capacities for group-communication in all-baby trios and quartets opens up new ways of imagining human development as fundamentally group-based. Babies in Groups highlights the changes a group-based vision of infancy brings to early child education and care by documenting the transformative consequences of introducing group-based practices into a high-quality childcare service in rural Australia. The book also examines the ways in which the belief that one-to-one infant-adult ‘attachments’ grounds human development unnecessarily narrows understanding of human potential, and slants scientific research. This examination culminates by showing how ignoring group contexts in many clinical traditions can distort descriptions of what happens in therapy, producing such unintended consequences as ‘mother-blaming’ for the future problems an infant may experience as she or he grows up.
This longitudinal study examined developmental links between closeness in teacher-child relationships and children's receptive language ability from the end of the preschool years into the early ...elementary years, while controlling for changes in peer interaction quality and child behavioral functioning. The sample included children and their parents and teachers (N = 4,983) participating in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) at ages 4-5, 6-7, and 8-9 years (3 waves). Teachers reported on levels of closeness in relationships with individual children. Independent assessments of receptive language were employed. Parents and teachers reported on peer interaction problems and child conduct problems. Results indicated reciprocal associations between close teacher-child relationships and receptive language development above and beyond associations with peer interaction quality and child behavioral functioning. However, the effects were only modest.
A sample (
N
= 112) composed primarily of European American and middle-class two-parent families with a resident father and a 4-year-old child (48% girls) participated in a longitudinal study of ...associations between coparenting and father involvement. At the initial assessment and 1 year later, fathers reported on their involvement in play and caregiving activities with the focal child, and coparenting behavior was observed during triadic family interactions. Structural equation modeling was used to test cross-lagged associations between coparenting behavior and father involvement. Overall, paths from father involvement to coparenting behavior were significant, but paths from coparenting behavior to father involvement were not. Specifically, greater father involvement in play was associated with an increase in supportive and a decrease in undermining coparenting behavior over time. In contrast, greater father involvement in caregiving was associated with a decrease in supportive and an increase in undermining coparenting behavior. Multigroup analysis further showed that these cross-lagged relations did not differ for dual-earner families and single-earner (father) families, but these relations appeared to differ for families with focal daughters and families with focal sons. These findings highlight the potential for fathering to affect coparenting and the importance of the role of contextual factors in coparenting-fathering relations.
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