Today, digital games are considered important tools for learning, but using them in early childhood education and care (ECEC) has raised the question of educators' roles when children play an educational digital game. The aim of this study was to explore how ECEC educators differed in their attitudes and perceptions toward and ways of supporting…

Using participatory observations accompanied by video and audio recordings, this article investigates how negotiations about play scripts evolve during play in two Waldorf kindergartens. In particular, this study aims to examine how child-initiated play can contribute to the development of basic democratic skills in early childhood. The concept of…

This study explored early childhood education and care (ECEC) teachers' visual gaze and related reflections on pedagogical actions during pedagogical activities in groups of children under three years of age in Finland. The data were collected from play and teacher-guided activities using mobile eye-tracking glasses, the retrospective thinking…

Social emotional learning (SEL) programs have been found to be effective on multiple outcomes, but few empirical studies were conducted in the Chinese context. The present study aimed to develop a Chinese SEL program for elementary school students, examine its effects on students' social emotional skills and mental health, and explore which groups…

Each preschool is obliged to prepare children to start school education, which means it should equip them with such skills and competencies that determine their readiness to start learning at school, in other words, school maturity. The aim of this study was to determine the level of emotions, feelings and social-emotional behaviours of…

An upward national trend in challenging behaviour amongst young children in Australian schools has prompted widespread concern and garnered frequent media scrutiny. Scholars have established that child-teacher relationships are central to understanding and mitigating challenging behaviour; however, exploration of teacher perceptions of children's…

In Hong Kong, play-based learning has been highlighted in the latest curriculum guide in 2017. While adopting 'child-centredness' as the core value of kindergarten education can enrich children's play experiences. However, little emphasis has been placed on how young children perceive play-based learning in the classroom. The aim of this…

Digital gaming has become a regular part of life for today's pre-schoolers. Hence, there is a need to look at the integration of digital technology into the preschool education. The present study aims to examine the effect digital games have on children's behaviour and their social competence if played to reach an educational purpose (supervised…

The notion of learning dispositions has extended conceptions of learning in early childhood education to incorporate dimensions such as habits of mind and patterns of behaviour. This paper conceptualizes learning dispositions through a Chinese lens, and with conceptualizing this notion, explores associated pedagogical practices. The data are drawn…

Maternal and paternal teaching sequences directed to their preschool children in a naturalistic home environment were investigated. The sample included 37 middle-class sibling dyads, aged four and six, and both their mothers and fathers during ongoing interactions in the home for six 90-minute sessions. Sequences of parent-child teaching were…

Various developmental studies have demonstrated that implied object weight is a key variable in children's interpretations of motion, such as predicting the objects' speeds. An additional bias in predictions of object motion is representational momentum (RM), where objects are anticipated to be found in a location farther along in the direction of…

This article aims to explore how the interactive whiteboard is situated in the social and material conditions of an early years free-flow learning environment. It examines how the affordances of the interactive whiteboard and the expectations of the surrounding classroom impact how activity involving the interactive whiteboard unfolds. It achieves…

The present study was conducted in order to determine the effect of a training programme on behavioural self-regulation skills of preschool children. For this purpose, the research was carried out as an experimental study based on pre-test-post-test model with a control group. The study group consisted of 54 children. In this study,…

This study investigated the flow experience of Jiro, a 2-year-old Japanese boy, regarding his violin playing in a social context. In this study, Jiro's violin playing was videotaped at home and during musical sessions for young children and families, guided by the author as a violinist-teacher-researcher. The method adopted a single case study…

Learning to read two scripts at a young age is a demanding task. This study aims to develop games for building fundamental code-related emergent literacy skills among biscriptal preschoolers. We developed five games and tested them on a sample of 102 Chinese kindergarteners. The participants were aged 4 to 5 years and were learning English as a…