Kindergartner's Mental Model

Christina J. Groark, Stephanie K. McCarthy, Afton R. Kirk. (2014). Early Child Development: From Theory to Practice. Bridgepoint Education, Inc.

Children are ‘thinking beings’ which involves the ability to think. How significantly their cognitive ability to think for others follows them taking part in a range tests, such as the ‘sally- Anne test’ and ‘smarties’ test. It comes to the conclusion that children under the age of four fail the standard ‘false belief’ test. Subsequently the meta-analysis results monitor these theories of children failing ‘false beliefs’ tasks.

Teachers are major learning resources in a young child’s life. “Teaching young children is one of the most important and most difficult of educational jobs.” (Edwards, Knight, 1). With these things in mind, how effective are early childhood learning programs? What are their purposes? Through this research paper all of these questions and more will be answered. We will review the purpose of each program and it’s effects on the students. The purpose of this research paper is to investigate the effectiveness of early childhood learning programs with respect to the long-term academic achievement of those students who attend the early childhood programs.

The foundations of early childhood education are based on a number of developmental theories. These theories are based on experiences and provide teachers with an understanding of how children develop and learn. It is important for teachers to be well-versed in these theories because they shape the trends and standards of early childhood classrooms. Developmental theories not only play a role in trends of early childhood education, but also shape the laws that impact classrooms today. These laws, whether set at the state or federal level, are important in ensuring children receive a fair and appropriate educational experience.

Behaviourist approaches – children learn as a result of what they see and what happens to them.

The process skills approach to teaching is defined as the educator helping children develop science skills and processes to confidently undertake their own investigations (Campbell, 2012). These skills are developed through: communicating, science language, asking questions, making sense of phenomena, predicting, modelling, conducting investigations, planning, testing, observing, reasoning, and drawing conclusions of science concepts (Campbell, 2012). When the educator assist children’s learning, it is important to put the emphasis on the nature of science and scientific concepts. Guided discovery approach to teaching requires the educator to ask effective questions that encourage children to explore and extend their investigations throughout science learning (Campbell, 2012). This can be developed through play experiences as children explore their world around them. An interactive approach to teaching children is based on questions that lead explorations and the educators to provide essential resources to guide these explorations (Campbell, 2012). It is the educators’ responsibility to support children’s development, ideas, questions, ways of thinking, and develop scientific thinking. Furthermore, an inquiry approach to teaching relates to children investigating the answers to their own

Hence children have misconceptions on the weather elements and changes in the environment (Reference book Year 1) Probing questions and discussing with the students about the moon’s phases

In order to respond this question, we must first review the history of Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) and Early Childhood Education (ECE). Although ECE has been around since the creation of kindergarten in the 1800’s, the decade of the 1980’s was an important period for ECE. “By the 1980’s, meta-analysis of the well-designed US projects offered compelling evidence on the positive outcomes of [early childhood education and intervention]” (Woodhead, 2007). Therefore, there was much pressure to improve the state of education, including ECE. “The decade of the 1980’s saw numerous calls for widespread school reform, with changes recommended in teacher education, graduation requirements, school structure, and accountability measures” (S. Bredekamp, R.A. Knuth, L.G. Kunesh, and D.D. Shulman, 1992). At this time, there was an increasing concern about the quality of early childhood education for the influx number of families that needed it. This led the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) to “begin planning a national voluntary accreditation system for early childhood programs”(NAEYC, 2014). With this planning came a need for a more specific description with regards to accreditation guidelines. Therefore, NAEYC issued a formal statement defining DAP.

Proof of Student Ideas: I will quote the student, explain their misconceptions and link findings to relevant academic literature.

As concerns continue to grow over bridging the gap between early education students, government intervention has and will continue to grow. An increase in assessments is inevitable, and even smaller amounts of time will be devoted to active learning, exploration and play. The changes that in fact need to be made are those that reflect the ideas of the great minds of theorists who dedicated their lives in order to determine the most

After watching this video, I was surprised by number of inaccurate private theories and the confidence of most of them. It allowed me to reflect on my own personal response. I realized my theories had changed when I entered a classroom that had a passionate teacher, visual aids, hands on demonstrations, and interesting videos. As teachers, we need to be aware of student’s private theories because many of these theories they will carry with them into their adult life. The graduating students and college professors were still incorrect on why the Earth has seasons and seemed confident in their misconception of seasons. Inaccurate theories may subsequently have negative effects in future decisions or careers.

The study participants’ were 2,439 children enrolled in 671 classrooms in 11 states and served 4-year-old population in their states. The study involved a nested design with 4 children participating within each classroom, and hierarchical linear model provided the conceptual framework. Results indicate that pre-K programs serving 4-year olds required teachers to have college degrees in early childhood education and mandated small class sizes and child-to-teacher ratio, may not be enough to guarantee that children learned in classrooms. However, young children in pre-K classrooms learned more when teachers interacted with them in stimulating and emotionally supportive ways (Mashburn et

Research demonstrates that while early childhood experts completely need to utilise children's advantage and past information as an establishment for their pedagogical centre, extensive time should gave to expanding and extending children's learning, skills, ideas and experience to take them past what they definitely know and can do (Arthur, Dockett, and Farmer, 2008). Coordinated showing and learning methodologies are best when they are intelligent, physical, and concrete and include individuals, materials and the earth. Youthful children need handy, hands on learning encounters in light of their hobbies and individual developmental level. Like grown-ups, children gain from their oversights and in addition their triumphs. At the point when early childhood experts make a society for this to happen, children's reasoning and learning is improved (Bowman, Donovan, and Burns, 2001).

In their study, they note that other research has led to varying conclusions of children’s understanding of the earth – this being, that some studies show that children “…construct their own non-scientific theories...” (pg. 432) and others indicate that many have some scientific understanding of the earth, but their knowledge lacks coherence. Similar to the previous research, Frède et al. (2011) tested with the different question types (open and forced-choice), and had a form of representations of the earth (2D pictures or 3D models), to examine how they would have an influence on the answers (scientific or non-scientific) given by children (pg. 435). Their results showed that similar to previous research, the forced-choice questions produced higher proportions of scientific answers from children than the open

Children, even at early ages, construct explanations for how the natural world works based on their daily observations of nature and the information they are exposed in their culture. (Saçkes, 2015) Since most of causal explanations from children are irrelevant to scientific explanations and even hinder the learning process of scientific concepts, Saçkes conducts a descriptive research with 46 kindergartners to investigate their “mental models” of the day and night cycle to realize what restrains children’s minds, and what educators can learn from analyzing their “mental models”.