Think Bright is an early intervention program using mediated learning to enhance the cognitive functioning of children with developmental delay. Keung and colleagues conducted a randomized control trial to investigate the effect of the program on Hong Kong preschoolers with developmental delay. The intervention included training activities that focused on three aspects of thinking skills: analogical thinking, sequential thinking, and logical reasoning. In contrast to teacher-centred direct teaching, mediated learning is a recurring four-step process of “Explore-Try-Mediate-Conclude”. In the process, teachers used mediation skills to facilitate and guide the child to perform the learning task by encouraging the child to think aloud and verbalize his/her approaches and findings. Hence, the researchers hypothesized that mediated learning not only improves thinking skills but also language skills. A total of 68 preschoolers (48 boys, 20 girls, mean age = 58 months) with cognitive and/or language delay was recruited from 15 rehabilitation service centres...

A recent longitudinal randomized controlled trial (RCT) by Kim and colleagues evaluated the effect of the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) intervention on the reading comprehension of early elementary students. The MORE intervention consisted of providing students in Grade 1 with 20 thematic content literacy lessons in science, providing related informational texts to read during the summer, and then building on the thematic content literacy with 45 additional lessons in Grade 2. The intervention was developed to expose students to increasingly complex information about a topic over time. Thus, students develop schemas, or ways of storing and retrieving knowledge, to comprehend new topics. The RCT was conducted over 12 months in 30 elementary schools with a sample of 1,176 students receiving the MORE intervention and 980 students assigned to business-as-usual literacy instruction. Teachers in the treatment condition received professional development and ongoing support from site-based literacy facilitators. Using audio recordings...

Petersen and colleagues conducted a large-scale randomized controlled trial, aiming to examine the effects of a multitiered system of language support (MTSLS) on kindergarten children’s oral and written language. Participants included 686 kindergarten students from 4 school districts in the Upper Midwest region. Researchers randomly assigned 28 full-day kindergarten classrooms to treatment (n=337 students) or control (n=349 students) conditions. The treatment group received 14 weeks of oral narrative language instruction using Story Champs, a contextualized language intervention and a discourse-based oral language curriculum. After 4 weeks of large group (Tier 1) Story Champs intervention, a random sample of students who did not make adequate progress in Tier 1 intervention (n=49 students) received supplemental small group (Tier 2) intervention. Results were showed below. Students in the treatment group had significantly higher scores on all outcome measures (i.e., narrative retell, personal story generation, expository retell, and narrative writing) compared to those in...

A recent study published in Journal of Educational Psychology examined the role of graphic organizers in promoting generative processing in learners. Graphic organizers are common ways of structuring texts. These include compare-and-contrast (e.g., matrix), sequence (e.g., flowchart) and hierarchy (e.g., tree diagram). In this study, matrix was the form of graphic organizer used to compare the northern and southern climates in China. Two approaches were compared to text-only information (NGO). The first approach used filled-in graphic organizers (FGO), in which comparison of the two climates described in the text had already been filled-in in a matrix. In this way, students can learn through a spatial arrangement of the text but may still not engage in deeper processing. The second approach used interactive graphic organizers (IGO). Students were required to create their own matrix through using apps for the comparison. The act of building a matrix graphic organizer requires more generative...

The coronavirus outbreak hit the world in early 2020 and caught all industries off-guard. Since then, schools and pre-schools were forced into long terms of suspension, bringing a completely new challenge to students, parents and teachers and pushing early childhood education to go fully digital.   ECE research blossomed due to this sudden change and provided solutions for effective teaching practices to sustain education as usual during the pandemic. Su et al. performed a systematic bibliometric synthesis of the knowledge generated from this research to guide effective change at the policy and practice levels. Their overview of 507 empirical articles on ECE during COVID-19 between 2020 and March 2022 revealed the following critical observations in early childhood research:    Online Learning and Teaching in ECE during the pandemic   Educators faced various challenges regarding their IT competence, lack of training in distance learning, and ability to maintain the quality of early childhood programmes;  ...

A research team in New York University evaluated a classroom-based oral storytelling program called Reading Success Using Co-Constructive Elaborative Storytelling Strategies (R-SUCCESS). R-SUCCESS is composed of three phases: pre-telling, which builds key content knowledge and vocabulary; telling, which involves specific strategies to scaffold children’s active listening skills and engagement; and post-telling, which supports children’s comprehension skills. The program was delivered at least twice a week for a 6-month period.   A total of 185 children within 12 classrooms participated in the study. The program was implemented in a Head Start program serving immigrant children with Latin American backgrounds. Among 12 participating lead teachers, six teachers in the intervention group were trained to deliver R-SUCCESS. The remaining six teachers, who served as a comparison group, were trained to have regular book reading sessions using the same techniques used in the pre-telling and post-telling phases in the intervention group. The key differences...

A study from Smolkowski et al. (2022), published in January 2022 reported on an evaluation of We Have Skills and its impact on both students and teachers. We Have Skills (WHS) is a short, universal curriculum that focuses on improving early elementary students’ academic and social skills, in the meantime increasing teacher classroom management effectiveness.   From 2015 to 2019, 127 early elementary teachers and their 2,817 students from multiple states were randomly assigned to either an immediate-intervention condition or a no-additional-intervention condition. Teachers assigned to the intervention condition received the WHS curriculum as a package, which included videos, skill tickets, a detailed 166-page teacher’s guide, access to the Elementary Social Behavior Assessment (an online screening system), and a brief initial training. Teachers assigned to the control condition were asked to teach students as they normally would.   The results showed that observer impressions of student behavior were positive but...

A meta-analysis study by Skene et al. aimed to examine the effectiveness of guided play on children’s learning progress, especially in Early Childhood Education (ECE). It also studied how guided play is being conceptualized and implemented in experimental studies. Guided play is a type of play-based learning that requires adults to provide guidance during children’s playing while still honoring children’s autonomy and choice. This meta-analysis reviewed 39 studies, of which 17 studies were included. In these studies, children aged from 1 to 8 years were included regardless of their gender, race, and other factors such as socioeconomic status. The studies included randomized controlled trials, in which participants were assigned randomly into control groups, and non-randomized controlled trials. Results suggested that guided play had positive effects on math and some executive functions such as task switching. There was no strong evidence to suggest that guided play could benefit children’s literacy skills...

A recent meta-analysis by Fishstrom and colleagues examined the effects of academic interventions on academic achievement and academic anxiety in students in kindergarten to Grade 6. The meta-analysis of 11 studies included 34 effect sizes, of which 17 were for academic achievement outcomes, and 17 were for academic anxiety outcomes. The results revealed statistically significant differences favoring academic treatments (g = 0.63, k = 11), consistent with existing research. In contrast, no statistically significant differences were found for academic anxiety outcomes (g = -0.06, k = 11). Despite the limitation of the small number of studies with elementary school students that met the criteria, and the difficulties in measuring academic anxiety, the study suggested that academic anxiety is not necessarily relieved by academic interventions.   Source: Fishstrom, S., Wang, H.-H., Bhat, B. H., Daniel, J., Dille, J., Capin, P., & Vaughn, S. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of academic...