Early Childhood Education Commons^™

The Role Of Digital Technologies In Supporting Quality Improvement In Australian Early Childhood Education And Care Settings, Maria Hatzigianni, Tanya Stephenson, Linda J. Harrison, Manjula Waniganayake, Philip Li, Lennie Barblett, Fay Hadley, Rebecca Andrews, Belinda Davis, Susan Irvine

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This national study explored the role of digital technologies in early childhood education and care settings and whether they could contribute to quality improvement as reported by educators and assessors of quality in Australia. In this paper, data from Stage 2 of the Quality Improvement Research Project were used, which comprised 60 Quality Improvement Plans from educators linked with 60 Assessment and Rating reports from the assessors who visited early childhood centres as part of the administration of the National Quality Standards by each of Australia’s State and Territory jurisdictions. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, U. (1995).Developmental ecology through space …

Gender Equity In Early Childhood Picture Books: A Cross-Cultural Study Of Frequently Read Picture Books In Early Childhood Classrooms In Australia And The United States, Helen Adam, Laurie Harper

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Children’s picture books contribute to children’s development of gender identity and can impact aspirations and expectations of roles in families and society. However, the world represented in children’s books reflects predominantly middle class, heterosexual, male heroes and characters. This paper reports on a cross-cultural study investigating gender representation in frequently read picture books across eight early learning centres in the United States and Australia. Forty-four educators working with 271 children participated. Data were collected from book audits and observations. Unique to this study is the presentation of a new data analysis instrument, Harper’s Framework of Gender Stereotypes Contained in Children’s …

A Model For Children’S Digital Citizenship In India, Korea, And Australia: Stakeholder Engagement Principles, Emma Jayakumar, Kylie Stevenson, Harrison See, Yeonghwi Ryu

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This white paper communicates research activities and findings investigating digital safety and digital citizenship through multistakeholder collaborations in three countries—India, South Korea, and Australia. Performed by an Edith Cowan University-based research team from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, supported by the LEGO Group, this research additionally responds to many recent policy and practice reviews arguing for institutional and policy engagement in the Asia Pacific (APAC) that build children’s digital safety, literacy and citizenship. These include the UNESCO data-driven report, Digital Kids Asia Pacific (DKAP): Insights into children’s digital citizenship (UNESCO, 2019), an earlier UNESCO review of …

Transforming Transitions To School: Using Funds Of Knowledge And Identity, Lennie Barblett, Fiona Boylan, Amelia Ruscoe

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This resource describes a project where ten Western Australian Independent Schools embraced a way of viewing children and their family’s transition to school.

Participating teachers came together as a community of practice and engaged in different ways of thinking and investigating accepted practice.Transition practices were affirmed or challenged as teachers were mentored through design-based thinking. Transition ideas were explored focussing on children’s funds of knowledge and identity. This resource outlines why transitions are important, considers transitions through a funds of knowledge and identity lens, and describes each school’s journey as they re-imagined transitions in this project. Finally, the ideas and …

Digital Literacy: A Review Of Literature, Lennie Barblett, Raisa Akifeva, Leanne Lavina, Fiona Boylan

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This report describes the main themes of collected literature to examine and explain the information in relation to making best practice recommendations for using digital technologies with children, and their families using Better Beginnings programs. These themes include:

• definitions of literacy,
• digital literacy in the context of childhood and children’s rights,
• dimensions of children’s digital literacy,
• digital technology, children and families,
• digital divide and diversity,
• eSafety, privacy, protection,
• children’s digital literacy learning, and
• librarian staff as digital literacy mentors and advocates.

The early childhood phase of childhood (particularly birth to age five) is one of the most under - researched …

Dialogic Drawing: A Method For Researching Abstract Phenomenon In Early Childhood, Amelia Ruscoe

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This article explores the theoretical, ethical, and practical opportunities and constraints considered in the methodological design and use of Dialogic Drawing, a participatory method for accessing qualitative data with young children. The method was designed to gather data about abstract phenomena from young children, as part of a larger study investigating the impact of discursive affordances in the first year of compulsory school in Western Australia. Methodological findings are reported from the application of Dialogic Drawing with 28 five-year-old children from diverse school-based semiotic landscapes in the Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia. Three strands of analysis are described and …

Lively Emu Dialogues: Activating Feminist Common Worlding Pedagogies, Mindy Blaise, Catherine Hamm

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper draws from a series of Place-thought walks that the authors took at an open-range zoo. It practices a feminist common worlds multispecies ethics to challenge the systems that maintain nature-culture divisions in early childhood education. Postdevelopmental perspectives (i.e., feminist environmental humanities, multispecies studies, Indigenous studies) are brought into conversation with early childhood education to consider how zoo-logics maintain binaries and hierarchical thinking. Zoo-logics are related to developmental, colonial, and Western ways of reasoning and being in the world. Two feminist approaches to ethics, (re)situating and dialoguing, are discussed and show how they are necessary for undermining binaries and …

Universal Child Health And Early Education Service Use From Birth Through Kindergarten And Developmental Vulnerability In The Preparatory Year (Age 5 Years) In Tasmania, Australia, Catherine L. Taylor, Daniel Christensen, Kim Jose, Stephen R. Zubrick

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This study investigated patterns of universal health and education service use from birth through Kindergarten (age 4 years) and estimated associations between cumulative risk and service use patterns, and between service use patterns and children's developmental vulnerability in the Preparatory Year (age 5 years). The study used population-wide linkage of health and education administrative data records for 5168 children who had a 2018 AEDC instrument collected in Tasmania and were born in Tasmania (2011–2013). Latent class analysis (LCA) identified three service use patterns: Regular (72.2 per cent of children; reference group), Low (15.6 per cent of children) and High service …

Children’S Digital Citizenship Project: Your Perspectives: A Report For Children, Harrison See, Kylie Stevenson, Emma Jayakumar, Phoebe Zeng

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This report talks about a teamwork project between the LEGO Group, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child (Digital Child) and Edith Cowan University (ECU).

In 2022, the LEGO Group, ECU and Digital Child researchers teamed up to ask children and adults in India, Korea and Australia about digital citizenship. We collected all this information together and compared our results, and then made some suggestions about how we can all do things better to help kids be safer, smarter, and happier online.

Children’S Perspectives Of Digital Citizenship In India, Korea And Australia: Report Of Findings From Children’S Digital Citizenship And Safety Roundtables, Kylie Stevenson, Emma Jayakumar, Harrison See, Yeonghwi Ryu, Shruti Das

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This report presents data and findings from Phase Two of the research project Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables. In this phase, which focuses on children’s perspectives of digital safety and digital citizenship, three child-focused, play-based roundtables were held in Seoul (Korea), Delhi (India) and Perth (Australia) respectively in the months of June and July 2022, with 48 children in total contributing their perspectives. Qualitative data was collected from these child participants through 90-minute play-based roundtables featuring three sections: a short introductory drawing activity using prompt cards; a discussion regarding the children’s understanding of digital citizenship; and a LEGO play activity …

Kindytxt: A Free Text Messaging Program For Kindergarten Children And Families, Lennie Barblett, Nicola Johnson, Caroline Barratt-Pugh, Susan Hill

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

• This project focused on developing, delivering and evaluating a literacy text-messaging program for parents / carers with a child at kindergarten in WA.
• Texts were delivered weekly over 30 weeks, in collaboration with Better Beginnings. Families were invited to participate through a flyer in the book gifting bag delivered by local librarians to families attending kindergarten across Western Australia.
• Kindergarten teachers and librarians from 16 LGAs attended workshops to establish kindergarten-family library partnerships, along with the production and evaluation of a partnership framework and implementation materials.
• Evaluation involved all participants, with in-depth data collected from participants in six communities.

‘I’M Trying To Tell You This Man Is Dangerous… And No One’S Listening’: Family Violence, Parent–School Engagement And School Complicity, Sue Saltmarsh, Eseta Tualaulelei, Kay Ayre

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020, The Author(s). This paper presents a case study of one mother’s experience of engaging with her children’s schools after leaving a long-term relationship characterised by years of family violence perpetrated by the children’s father. We interviewed Bernadette as part of an ongoing study of parents’ experiences of school engagement during family separation and divorce. Her family circumstances and the role the children’s schools played in that story merit consideration by educators, school leaders and education policy makers. Informed by theories of everyday cultural practices and sociological studies of gendered power relations in education, we argue that gender politics …

The Role Of Background Knowledge In Reading Comprehension: A Critical Review, Reid Smith, Pamela Snow, Tanya Serry, Lorraine Hammond

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. A critical review was conducted to determine the influence background knowledge has on the reading comprehension of primary school-aged children. We identified twenty-three studies that met our criteria and focused on the links between background knowledge and reading comprehension of children in the mid to late primary years. Review findings highlight that higher levels of background knowledge have a range of effects that are influenced by the nature of the text, the quality of the situation model required, and the presence of reader misconceptions about the text. Our findings also indicate that background …

Book Sharing With Young Children: A Study Of Book Sharing In Four Australian Long Day Care Centres, Helen Adam, Caroline Barratt-Pugh

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Research has consistently established the positive impact of sharing books with young children. Evidence suggests several important factors when evaluating book sharing with young children, including the quality of educator practice = and the nature of groupings, as well as the frequency and duration of book sharing sessions and access to books.

Other evidence suggests book sharing may be particularly important for children from low ses backgrounds attending early learning settings.

This paper reports on a larger study which investigated the factors and relationships influencing the use of children’s literature to support principles of diversity in kindergarten rooms of long …

Enchanted Animism: A Matter Of Care, Jane Merewether

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© The Author(s) 2020. Jean Piaget, whose work continues to be very influential in early childhood education, associated young children’s animism with their ‘primitive thought’ claiming children remain animists until they reach a more advanced and rational stage of development. This article proposes a rethinking of the Piagetian view of animism, suggesting instead that children’s animism be conceived as a ‘matter of care’ which may then offer possibilities for living more responsively and attentively with non human others. Drawing on two recent research projects involving two-to-eight-year-old children, the article contends that children’s playful and speculative ‘enchanted animism’ can create a …

Early Childhood Teachers’ Perspectives Of Growth Mindset: Developing Agency In Children, Fiona Boylan, Lennie Barblett, Marianne J. Knaus

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The integration of mindset theory into classrooms can assist children in optimizing academic achievement, increasing their agency for learning. The development of a growth mindset allows children to exercise autonomy over their learning, helping them to develop positive lifelong learning habits for the twenty-first century. This paper explores early childhood teachers’ perspectives of mindset and the role of a growth mindset in developing children’s agency for learning. Despite increasing research in this field, little is known about the perspectives that early childhood teachers have of mindset. This paper reports on the data from a study that describes teachers’ perspectives towards …

Read To Me I Love It! Evaluation Of The Better Beginnings Program For Remote Aboriginal Communities, Lennie Barblett

Research outputs 2012

Better Beginnings for remote Aboriginal communities started in 2010 with the aim of bringing literacy resources to families with children up to five years of age in remote communities. It was developed as part of the Better Beginnings program which is a universal program for children and their families that aims to develop literacy skills through fostering a love of books and language. A finding in the larger evaluation of this project (Barrat-Pugh, Rohl & Statkus, 2010) found that there was a need for targeted strategies and resources to better support Aboriginal families and hence Better Beginnings for remote Aboriginal …