Young children learn best through hands-on, authentic experiences that motivates, stimulates and supports their growth in all areas of development. This includes the skills necessary to enhance their literacy and language acquisition, physical and cognitive development in addition to their social-emotional development and approaches to learning.…

A compulsory foreign language in Finland starts now in Grade 1 instead of Grade 3. The change has forced teachers to adopt new teaching methods. As young learners are not yet literate, teaching should focus on oral skills and awareness of diversity. Video data from 19 early foreign language lessons of five English, German, or French teachers in…

E-learning platforms have become increasingly popular in K--8 education to promote student learning and enhance classroom teaching. Student interactions with these platforms produce trace data, which are digital records of learning processes. Although trace data have been effective in identifying learners' engagement profiles in higher education…

Due to swift technological changes in society, programming tasks are proliferating in formal and informal education around the globe. However, challenges arise regarding the acquisition of programming skills. Many students are unequipped to develop programming skills due to limited instruction or background and therefore feel insecure when…

In this challenge, the authors wanted to support students' knowledge of light and the ways in which it interacts with other materials through a series of connected learning experiences. These experiences are related to "NGSS standard 1-PS4-3 Waves and Their Applications in Technologies for Information Transfer. Plan and conduct investigations…

This dissertation investigates how embodied learning within a Mixed Reality (MR) environment supports young children's science learning, focusing on a honeybee system. To do so, I designed three types of activities within an MR environment to enable young children to assume different perspectives as they create embodied models of honeybees as…

There is a lack of research evaluating the effects of digital textbooks and digital apps on learning for early elementary school learners. Therefore, this study conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate how an iPad application for learning English as a foreign language impacted children's grammar understanding, satisfaction, persistence,…

Representation in science is anything that stands for something else--drawings, pictures, graphs, or other representational forms (Danish et al. 2020). Representations serve as public displays of phenomena that make aspects of those phenomena explicit (Gilbert 2008). They can serve to make the invisible visible, communicate ideas, display…

Phoneme discrimination is the ability to detect subtle similarities and differences between phonemes. Phoneme discrimination is a strong predictor of reading development and poor phoneme discrimination may predict reading disabilities (Lyytinen et al., 2004). The ability to discriminate phonemes may be an even more critical skill for Emergent…

This study aimed to create a game as scaffolding in 3D virtual worlds to enhance linguistic communication skills (LCS) in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Two ADHD children participated in the 17-week study. In 8 of the 17 weeks of the study, they logged in 3D virtual worlds to learn LCS through play twice a week, one…

Developing young learners' language awareness is becoming an important educational goal in a rapidly globalised world characterised by linguistic and cultural diversity. Drawing upon previous research in the field, the article highlights the importance of promoting language diversity and nurturing language awareness from an early age. We present a…

This is an exploratory study of how pedagogy in the form of math stories, shapes young learners' perceptions, motivations, and sense-making of math concepts. The research is presented in an exploratory documentary, with audio-video data collected through the iPhone. The pilot test of story-driven math learning solutions was conducted by two…

Can You Build It? is an engaging Improve It! task that asks children to construct 3D shapes based on 2D depictions. Students' initial 3D creations often need revision, and as they build and re-build, they develop spatial relationships. This task was implemented in a first-grade class, connected to composing 3D geometric shapes to address the…

Within educational research, there has been an increased interest in recent years to develop learners' language awareness (LA) in the context of plurilingual education. Recommendations and intentions are given pointing to the benefits, but there are few concrete tools for how it can be carried out in practice. The article seeks to contribute to…

IPAS ("Ilmu Pengetahuan Alam dan Sosial"/Natural and Social Sciences) constitutes essential subjects in the implementation of the Merdeka Curriculum in primary schools. The primary goal of integrating IPAS is to enable students to effectively manage their natural and social environment as a whole. In light of this objective, the…