Pre-K

This article describes the development of four novel non-visual panning methods designed from the onset with consideration of these perceptual and cognitive constraints.

This paper studies key usability parameters governing accurate rendering of haptically-perceivable graphical materials

This paper studies key usability parameters governing accurate rendering of haptically-perceivable graphical materials

This brief draws on research supported by the National Science Foundation to highlight important considerations for educators and others who design and provide STEM educational experiences for young children.

The ubiquity of touchscreen, mobile tablet technology has resulted in a plethora of “apps for learning” yet few leverage the learning sciences as a design driver. This paper describes our approach to integrating the learning sciences with best practices in app design: a design framework that involves researchers and developers in a co-development process to create apps based on research and evidence. Our framework centers around a learning blueprint which is intended to serve as a “boundary object.” This boundary object facilitates a design process that allows the design team to focus on both children’s engagement and learning. Here we describe the challenges that our project team encountered and our approaches to overcome those challenges on the Next Generation Preschool Math (NGPM) project, a development and research effort devoted to creating a supplemental preschool math curriculum supplement with integrated digital apps.

This chapter focused on learning and teaching measurement.

This monograph is a report on a four-year-long multisite longitudinal study that studied children’s thinking and learning about geometric measurement (i.e., length, area, and volume).

In this article, authors evaluated the effects of three instructional interventions designed to support young children’s understanding of area measurement as a structuring process.

A Pleasure to Measure will enable you to select activities quickly, easily, and confidently to target the content that your students are ready to learn. You’ll find everything that you need in the six E’s that the authors detail for each activity—Essentials, Engage, Explore, Expect, Extend, and Enrich.

Quality early science education is important for addressing the low science achievement, compared to international peers, of elementary students in the United States. Teachers’ beliefs about their skills in a content area, that is, their content self-efficacy is important because it has implications for teaching practice and child outcomes. However, little is known about how teachers’ self-efficacy for literacy, math and science compare and how domain-specific self-efficacy relates to teachers’ practice in the area of science. Analysis of survey and observation data from 67 Head Start classrooms across eight programs indicated that domain-specific self-efficacy was highest for literacy, significantly lower for science, and lowest for math. Classrooms varied, but in general, engaged in literacy far more than science, contained a modest amount of science materials, and their instructional support of science was low. Importantly, self-efficacy for science, but not literacy or math, related to teachers frequency of engaging children in science instruction. Teachers’ education and experience did not predict self-efficacy for science. Practice or Policy: To enhance the science opportunities provided in early childhood classrooms, pre-service and in-service education programs should provide teachers with content and practices for science rather than focusing exclusively on literacy.

Now more than ever, scientific literacy (i.e., systemizing methods, engaging in critical comparison, utilizing research to inform practice) has been recognized as vital for the 21st-century workforce (National Research Council, 2010 National Research Council. (2010). Exploring the intersection of science education and 21st century skills: A workshop summary. National Research Council. Washington, DC: National Academies Press). Strong science education is critical for developing these skills in the U.S. population. However, U.S. elementary children perform below several of their international peers in science achievement tests (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2012). This is not surprising considering that the foundation for scientific understanding is shaky: Elementary teachers spend just 6% to 13% of their instructional time teaching science (NCES, 2012 National Center for Education Statistics. (2012). The condition of education 2012. Retrieved from
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012045.pdf), and preschool teachers devote even less time (4%–8% of instructional time) to promoting science experiences (Tu, 2006 Tu, T. (2006). Preschool science environment: What is available in a preschool classroom? Early Childhood Education Journal, 33, 245–251. doi:10.1007/s10643-005-0049-8). A primary factor, particularly among early childhood educators, is a lack of preparation for designing and implementing science education, which results in little confidence for teaching science (Greenfield et al., 2009 Greenfield, D. B., Jirout, J., Dominguez, X., Greenberg, A., Maier, M., & Fuccillo, J. (2009). Science in the preschool classroom: A programmatic research agenda to improve science readiness. Early Education & Development, 20, 238–264. doi:10.1080/10409280802595441; Hamlin & Wisneski, 2012 Hamlin, M., & Wisneski, D. B. (2012). Supporting the scientific thinking and inquiry of toddlers and preschoolers through play. Young Children, 67, 82–88). Of course, children are unlikely to develop necessary science knowledge and skills without effective science instruction and experiences (Gelman & Brenneman, 2012 Gelman, R., & Brenneman, K. (2012). Classrooms as learning labs. In N. Stein & S. Raudenbusch (Eds.), Developmental science goes to school (pp. 113–126). New York, NY: Routledge; Morris, Croker, Masnick, & Zimmerman, 2012 Morris, B. J., Croker, S., Masnick, A. M., & Zimmerman, C. (2012). The emergence of scientific reasoning. In H. Kloos, B. J. Morris, & J. L. Amaral (Eds.), Current topics in children’s learning and cognition (pp. 61–82). Rijeka, Croatia: InTech). Thus, one critical research aim fulfilled by the present study was to describe early childhood educator self-efficacy for science and identify how self-efficacy is related to the science opportunities provided in early childhood classrooms.