In order to create and foster learning spaces that build upon children's knowledge and experiences, we must respect and value their ways of knowing and being, including their play. Accordingly, this study highlights the ways that young children (re)imagined spaces, materials, and identities through their digital play in an analog (containing no…

Purpose: To align with the artificial intelligence and robotics (AIR) research and policy agenda, this paper puts forth an adapted five big ideas framework specifically tailored to teaching young children about artificial intelligence (AI) via robotics. Design/Approach/Methods: Grounded in early childhood education research, the proposed framework…

This paper reports the results of a qualitative action research study conducted with children from a private Colombian institution. This study aimed to analyze the learners' cognitive and knowledge outcomes measured according to the revised Bloom's taxonomy once content and language integrated learning was implemented. Data were gathered through…

In this study, the conceptual associations of colors in preschool children were examined with an interdisciplinary perspective. Designed as a preliminary review, this study provides insights and suggestions about how conceptual associations of colors can be used for developing products and services for kids and improving the effectiveness of…

The purpose of this study is to discover pre-school children's vocabulary learning, retention levels, and perspectives of English language learning using augmented reality (AR) technology. To achieve this goal, a one-group pre-test, and post-test design was used to assess the effect of using AR-supported educational toys on pre-school children's…

This paper explores one child's use of their schema to construct their knowledge and understanding within the early years curriculum for Wales -- the Foundation Phase (FP). It considers how a knowledge of schemas can facilitate practitioners in supporting children along their learning continuum and inform classroom pedagogy. This paper explores…

Executive function (EF) predicts children's academic achievement; however, less is known about the relation between EF and the actual learning process. Furthermore, more research is needed to better understand how different aspects of the learning environment interact with EF to influence learning. The current dissertation includes two studies to…

This preliminary study investigated the effects of co-treatment by an adapted physical educator and speech-language pathologist on basic concept vocabulary learning in preschool children with Down syndrome as compared with the effects of treatment by either professional alone. In a Repeated Acquisition Design/Adapted Alternating Treatment study,…

This paper draws on observational studies of three young children in order to demonstrate firstly, their intrinsic motivation to explore systematically through repeated patterns of action or 'schemas'; secondly, how those repeated actions appear and are explored in their emerging language demonstrating their increasing construction of and…

This 22-session constructivist teaching experiment set out to investigate a preschool student's number understanding relative to his subitizing activity. Subitizing, a quick apprehension of the numerosity of a small set of items, has been found to characterize perceptual and conceptual processes students rely on as their understanding of number…

These studies examined the role of ontological beliefs about category boundaries in early categorization. Study 1 found that preschool-age children (N = 48, aged 3-4 years old) have domain-specific beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries; children judged the boundaries of natural kind categories (animal species, human gender) as discrete…

There are many continuous quantitative dimensions in the physical world. Philosophical, psychological and neural work has focused mostly on space and number. However, there are other important continuous dimensions (e.g., time, mass). Moreover, space can be broken down into more specific dimensions (e.g., length, area, density) and number can be…

The international trend to increase the cognitive achievement of early childhood children has generated a need for better understanding how concept formation occurs within play-based programs. Yet the theories of play for supporting early childhood professionals were originally not conceptualized with this need in mind. In this article, concepts…

Two studies investigated the relationship between learning names and learning concepts in preschool children. More specifically, we focused on the relationship between learning the names and learning the intended functions of artifacts, given that the intended function of an artifact is generally thought to constitute core conceptual information…

Preschool children were trained on a color relevant oddity problem by one of 3 methods: (1) increased salience of the oddity relationship, (2) instruction on solution rule, or (3) a combination of both. Generality of results were probed with a form-relevant transfer problem. (DP)