The review, conducted by researchers at The Education University of Hong Kong and Dezhou University, set out to resolve a question that has divided the field: are embodied social robots, or ESRs, genuine social catalysts that stimulate children’s interpersonal growth, or merely scripted tutors that deliver adult-designed content in an engaging package? Social-emotional competence, often abbreviated as SEC, encompasses a child’s ability to understand and manage emotions, show empathy, build relationships, and navigate social conflicts. It is widely regarded as a foundation for later academic success and mental health, which is precisely why the prospect of robot-assisted SEL, or social-emotional learning, has attracted such intense interest from educators, technologists, and investors alike.

Methodologically, the review followed established scoping review frameworks, including the Arksey and O’Malley methodological tradition and the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews, to identify, screen, and chart the relevant literature. The authors organized the eighty-six child-level findings they extracted into six condensed domains of social-emotional competence and then examined how those outcomes varied according to measurement approaches, robot and intervention characteristics, and the practical conditions under which the interventions were implemented. This multi-layered mapping matters because, as the authors demonstrate, the apparent effectiveness of a robot intervention depends heavily on how researchers choose to measure its impact and how the technology is actually deployed in real classrooms.

The headline finding is one of mixed evidence. Positive results clustered most consistently around what the authors call proximal indicators of social-emotional functioning: children’s participation, engagement, and communication during robot-mediated activities. Preschoolers in the reviewed studies frequently interacted readily with robots, sustained attention during structured tasks, and showed increased verbal or behavioral engagement compared with baseline conditions. By contrast, broader or more complex SEC-related outcomes, such as durable gains in empathy, emotion regulation, or generalized prosocial behavior across settings, far more often showed no effect or inconsistent patterns. In other words, robots reliably captured children’s attention and got them talking, but the evidence that they durably reshaped deeper social-emotional capacities remains thin.

A particularly striking technical insight from the review concerns the role of measurement methodology itself. Behavioral observation and structured experimental tasks were substantially more likely to detect positive change than interviews or indicators extracted automatically from robot system logs. The authors also flag a serious psychometric problem: only about one-third of the reported findings were backed by documented reliability or validation procedures for the instruments used. Interviews and system-recorded data, in particular, were rarely supported by evidence that they actually measured what they claimed to measure. This means that some of the more enthusiastic claims in the literature may reflect measurement artifacts rather than genuine developmental change, a caution that applies well beyond robotics to the broader field of educational technology evaluation.

The review also paints a sobering picture of the technology as it currently exists in classrooms. Most interventions relied on low-autonomy, non-personalized robots embedded in adult-guided activities. In practical terms, the robots were typically scripted or remotely operated devices with limited capacity to perceive a child’s emotional state, adapt their behavior, or personalize interactions over time. This is consistent with a well-known issue in human-robot interaction research: many celebrated demonstrations involve hidden human control, the so-called Wizard of Oz paradigm, whose influence is often underreported. Far from being independent social agents, most classroom robots today function as animated props within a teacher-orchestrated lesson, and the review argues that acknowledging this reality is essential for honest interpretation of the evidence.

Implementation conditions emerged as another weak point. Reporting of technical stability, implementation fidelity, and teacher preparedness or involvement was uneven across the twenty-five studies. The authors note that when a robot malfunctioned mid-session, when an intervention deviated from its intended script, or when teachers received inadequate training, these details frequently went unrecorded, making it difficult to judge whether null results reflected genuine ineffectiveness or simply poor execution. This gap has practical consequences: schools considering robot investments currently have little reliable guidance about the staffing, training, and technical infrastructure required to replicate the conditions of successful trials. The review’s call for ecologically grounded classroom research, conducted in ordinary settings rather than carefully staged laboratory-like conditions, is a direct response to this problem.

What should educators and parents take away from all this? The authors recommend a cautious but not dismissive interpretation. The evidence supports using embodied social robots as bounded, teacher-mediated supports, tools that can enrich adult-guided activities, motivate engagement, and possibly create structured opportunities for practicing communication and cooperation, particularly for children who may find human-only interactions intimidating. Indeed, some prior work reviewed by the authors suggests that shy preschoolers may interact differently, and sometimes more openly, when learning with a robot rather than a human instructor. But the review firmly rejects the notion of robots as stand-alone solutions for social-emotional development. A machine that cannot reliably read a child’s frustration, model authentic empathy, or repair a social rupture cannot substitute for the responsive human relationships that developmental science identifies as central to early social-emotional growth.

The review also points toward clearer ethical safeguards as the field matures. Young children are uniquely vulnerable research participants and technology users, and questions about attachment to machines, data collected by robot sensors, and the appropriate framing of robots as social versus mechanical entities remain actively debated in the literature. The authors argue that future studies must pair stronger measurement reporting with explicit ethical frameworks, ensuring that enthusiasm for innovative technology does not outrun the field’s obligations to the children involved. Their conclusion is ultimately a call for scientific maturity: more rigorous and validated measurement, honest reporting of implementation realities, research grounded in genuine classroom ecologies, and a realistic framing of what robots can and cannot contribute. For now, the most defensible role for embodied social robots in early childhood education is that of a well-supervised assistant to human teachers, not their replacement, and the research community is only beginning to map, carefully and skeptically, where that assistance genuinely helps preschoolers flourish.

Subject of Research: The effects of embodied social robots on preschool children's social-emotional competence

Article Title: Social Catalysts or Social Tutors? Embodied Social Robots and Preschoolers’ Social-Emotional Competence: a Scoping Review

Article References: Qin, L., Wu, Y., & Li, H. (2026). Social Catalysts or Social Tutors? Embodied Social Robots and Preschoolers’ Social-Emotional Competence: a Scoping Review. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02347-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02347-w

Keywords: embodied social robots, social-emotional competence, preschool children, scoping review, early childhood education, social-emotional learning, human-robot interaction, educational robotics, measurement validity, classroom implementation, teacher-mediated learning, research ethics

The research team, led by Goutam Roy of Charles Sturt University together with colleagues Shukla Sikder and Will Letts, set out to address a gap that has long been acknowledged but rarely examined directly. While numerous studies have documented the importance of building scientific literacy in the early years and its long-term benefits, few have asked what happens after the initial spark: how children move from developing an understanding of scientific ideas to genuinely retaining and extending that understanding across contexts. The authors define scientific literacy as a combination of acquiring scientific knowledge, establishing connections with the real world, and applying that knowledge in similar or new situations, a framing that aligns with what scholars call Vision 2 of scientific literacy, which emphasises applicability in daily life rather than purely academic science content.

To investigate the process, the researchers adopted a qualitative design grounded in cultural-historical theory, using digital video observation to capture the full texture of children’s play. The study took place at an early childhood centre in the central west region of New South Wales, Australia, where four educators and 22 children aged four to five participated. Before any filming began, the team held a one-hour professional development session with educators and the centre director to discuss the study’s aims, relevant scientific concepts, and how educators might support children’s learning through play. Over a two-week period, three cameras documented a series of colour-focused play activities, generating more than nine and a half hours of video footage across three sessions lasting just over three hours and twenty minutes in total.

The three play experiences were deliberately sequenced to build on one another. In the first activity, children mixed liquid and ice-block colours at a table while educators asked open-ended questions about what would happen when one colour was added to another. Children discovered, for example, that adding red to an existing green produced what one child memorably called a ‘yucky colour’, and educators extended the conversation by inviting children to draw rainbows and think about where rainbow colours come from. The researchers interpret this stage as the establishment of an initial scientific literacy: children acquired knowledge of colour mixing and immediately applied it in a hands-on situation, linking what Vygotsky termed everyday concepts with the beginnings of scientific understanding.

The second day pushed the children’s knowledge into new territory through two experiments. First, children cut stalks of celery and placed them in coloured water, observing how the vegetable absorbed the dye and changed colour, an everyday application of the previous day’s learning. Then an educator attempted something more ambitious: creating a real rainbow using only a spray bottle of plain water and sunlight. The children were asked how many colours a rainbow contains and whether it could be made without dyes. Despite several attempts, including moving to a higher position, no rainbow appeared. The researchers argue that this failure was itself pedagogically valuable. The educator connected the disappointment back to the concept by naming the rainbow’s colours and singing a rainbow song with the children, demonstrating that unsuccessful experiments can still deepen curiosity, imagination, and reasoning when educators explain the underlying process.

The third activity transformed the children’s knowledge once more by changing the state of an object. Working with corn flour, liquid colours, and water, children created mixtures ranging from thin to thick, deciding for themselves whether to add more flour or more water. Crucially, the educator did not prescribe instructions but instead asked children what they wanted to do, prompting them to reason about cause and effect: adding corn flour made the mixture thicker, while adding water thinned it. The researchers observed children drawing on their earlier learning about colour mixing, applying it to a new material, and making informed decisions about proportions. This, they argue, is the hallmark of sustaining scientific literacy: the ability to apply scientific reasoning across related contexts, revisiting prior knowledge and generating new explanations.

From the analysis, conducted using the dialectical-interactive approach developed by Hedegaard and Fleer across three interpretive levels, the team distilled a four-stage continuous process for sustaining scientific literacy: planned play-based scientific experiences, initial scientific literacy, continuation, and sustaining scientific literacy. In the first stage, educators design a series of connected activities aligned with specific science concepts and children’s interests. In the second, children acquire knowledge and apply it practically, as with the colour mixing. The continuation stage involves interrelated problem-solving tasks that link previous knowledge to new applications, such as the celery and rainbow experiments. Finally, sustaining scientific literacy emerges as children consciously apply their understanding in progressively more advanced situations, using critical thinking and decision-making. The process depends on educators acting as play partners who scaffold learning through questions, prompts, and shared dialogue, consistent with the Australian Early Years Learning Framework’s emphasis on planned, intentional teaching through play.

The theoretical engine driving this process is Vygotsky’s account of the relationship between everyday and scientific concepts. Vygotsky argued that children’s everyday concepts form the foundation of their scientific concepts, and that scientific concepts in turn restructure and elevate everyday concepts, writing that scientific concepts ‘are not learned in final form—they too develop.’ The study’s authors apply this insight to scientific literacy, suggesting that isolated, one-off science play experiences are insufficient to sustain it. Instead, scientific ways of thinking, knowing, and applying knowledge must be revisited and transformed across a series of related experiences, allowing children to build conscious awareness of concepts they initially engage with only implicitly. When educators make these connections explicit through carefully planned play, children progress toward higher-order skills such as problem-solving, analytical competence, and the socio-scientific decision-making that scholars like Holbrook and Rannikmae and Johnson identify as the ultimate aims of scientific literacy.

The authors are candid about the practical challenges of implementing their framework. The four-stage process depends on educators’ willingness and intentionality, and some may feel uncertain about their own scientific knowledge, lacking the confidence to guide children from developing to sustaining scientific literacy. The researchers stress that educators do not need to be science content experts; the emphasis falls on planning, organising, engaging, describing, and questioning to prompt children’s higher-level understanding. They also caution that pedagogical responsiveness cannot be assumed across all early childhood contexts without adequate policy support and professional development, and that cultural differences in orientations toward co-constructed learning may require the process to be adapted locally rather than applied as a uniform pathway.

The study’s implications reach beyond the preschool classroom. Because scientific literacy underpins informed citizenship, the ability to evaluate evidence, and engagement with complex socio-scientific issues later in life, ensuring that early gains endure is arguably as important as producing them. The researchers suggest that future work should examine how the process can be negotiated across diverse settings, how structural and policy supports can help educators sustain children’s scientific literacy, and whether interdisciplinary approaches could strengthen the framework. For now, the humble act of mixing colours, feeding celery dyed water, and chasing an elusive rainbow offers a compelling demonstration that sustained scientific literacy can begin not with formal lessons, but with play, guided by educators who know when to step in and when to let children lead.

Subject of Research: How educators can support children in sustaining scientific literacy through play-based experiences in the early years.

Article Title: Sustaining Scientific Literacy Among Children Through Play In The Early Years: A Cultural-Historical View

Article References: Roy, G., Sikder, S., & Letts, W. (2026). Sustaining Scientific Literacy Among Children Through Play In The Early Years: A Cultural-Historical View. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02322-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02322-5

Keywords: scientific literacy, early childhood education, play-based learning, cultural-historical theory, Vygotsky, preschool science, educators, STEM education, everyday concepts, scientific concepts, video observation, Australia

The research, conducted by Valentina Lucia La Rosa, Maria Luisa Indiana, Emanuela Borzì, Daniela Pirone, Elisabetta Sagone, Elena Commodari, and Alessandra Geraci at the University of Catania, builds on a well-established tradition in developmental psychology but adds a crucial cognitive twist. Earlier work had shown that children attribute fair and unfair distributions differently depending on the perceived gender of the distributor, yet comparatively little attention had been paid to the mental structures, known as schemas, that make such attributions possible. Gender schemas are organized knowledge structures that guide how children process, interpret, and remember gender-relevant information, and understanding when children first deploy them to encode social behavior is central to tracing the developmental origins of bias.

The team tested 160 typically developing children divided into four equal age groups: toddlers aged 2.5 years, preschoolers aged 3.8 years, kindergartners aged 5, and school-age children aged 8. Each child watched brief familiarization events in which a distributor, hidden behind a gray box, either gave one apple to each of two receivers, a cow and a pig, or handed both apples to a single receiver. Immediately afterward, the experimenter presented two schematic drawings, one male and one female, and asked the child to identify the distributor by picking up the correct picture. The position of the pictures was counterbalanced, the order of fair and unfair events was alternated across participants, and a manipulation check with 50 university students confirmed that the schematic figures were unambiguously recognized as male and female with 100 percent accuracy.

The results traced a non-linear developmental trajectory that surprised no one more than the researchers’ own carefully calibrated hypotheses. At 2.5 years, children chose the male and female figures at chance levels for both fair and unfair distributions, exactly as predicted by the literature on pictorial competence. Infants younger than three often treat pictures as objects to be touched and grasped rather than symbols that stand for something else, and the ability to hold both the physical properties of an image and its abstract referential meaning in mind simultaneously, what psychologists call dual representation, emerges only gradually. Without that symbolic foundation, the youngest participants simply could not map a schematic figure onto a real-world gender category, and their choices therefore revealed no gender-based pattern at all.

By 3.8 years, however, the picture changed dramatically. Seventy percent of children in this age group selected the male figure after watching a fair distribution, a statistically significant deviation from chance with a medium effect size, while their choices remained at chance after unfair events. This is the signature of what the researchers define as gender bias: a systematic tendency to attribute positive social behaviors preferentially to one’s own gender group, reflecting in-group favoritism without necessarily implying a negative evaluation of the out-group. The pattern was driven almost entirely by boys, 81.8 percent of whom attributed fair distributions to the male figure, while girls of the same age showed no significant tendency in either direction. According to Social Identity Development Theory, this asymmetry makes sense: in-group favoritism emerges as children consolidate a positive sense of group membership, and its strength depends on how salient and self-defining that group has become. For boys approaching their fourth birthday, gender may already function as a highly salient social category.

At age 5, the pattern flipped in a theoretically meaningful way. Children no longer associated the male figure with fair behavior; instead, 67.5 percent of them attributed unfair distributions to the male figure, again a significant departure from chance. This qualitative shift coincides with what decades of research identify as the developmental peak of gender stereotype rigidity, spanning roughly ages 5 to 7. During this window, children behave as what Martin and Ruble famously called gender detectives, diligently searching their environment for stereotype-consistent information and consolidating it into increasingly rigid expectations. Developmental Intergroup Theory predicts precisely this outcome: as gender becomes an ever more salient dimension of social life, children encode stereotype-consistent information with growing intensity, and here that intensity manifested as the association of men with dominant, inequitable behavior.

The most articulated pattern emerged among 8-year-old girls, who simultaneously attributed fair distributions to the female figure, at 71.4 percent, and unfair distributions to the male figure, at 78.6 percent. This combination of in-group favoritism and out-group negativity meets the study’s operational definition of gender prejudice, a qualitatively different construct from mere bias. Male 8-year-olds, by contrast, showed no significant gender-based pattern in either condition. The researchers suggest that girls at this age may have developed heightened sensitivity to gender-based social hierarchies, motivating a reactive intergroup stance in which protecting the in-group and devaluing the out-group become two sides of the same coin. Taken together, the findings sketch a trajectory in which boys display earlier but less differentiated in-group favoritism, while girls develop a later but more elaborated pattern that integrates group protection with out-group criticism.

The authors are careful to frame these results within a biosocial model rather than a simple nature-versus-nurture debate. An evolved sensitivity to group membership may provide the initial scaffold, but the direction of children’s attributions is unmistakably shaped by experience. From their earliest years, children observe that caregiving and daily resource allocation are unequally distributed across genders, and these accumulated observations likely feed the early association between the male figure and prosocial or dominant behavior. Crucially, the researchers emphasize that the attribution patterns observed here are not fixed developmental outcomes. Because they emerge from socialization, they remain modifiable: intervention research consistently shows that exposure to counter-stereotypical role models, such as female leaders and male caregivers in children’s stories, can attenuate gender bias even at preschool age.

The study does carry important boundary conditions. The sample consisted exclusively of White children from a single Italian region with limited socioeconomic diversity, so the observed patterns cannot be assumed to generalize to populations where gender norms and expectations about distributive fairness differ substantially. The use of highly schematic figures, while useful for isolating gender as the sole variable, reduces ecological validity, since real-world gender perception draws on a rich constellation of facial, vocal, and behavioral cues. Moreover, the forced-choice paradigm measures attribution behavior without directly observing the underlying schemas, and the authors call for future work pairing the task with independent assessments of gender schema knowledge, culturally diverse samples, longitudinal designs, and richer stimuli such as videos of dynamic social interactions.

Even with these caveats, the practical implications are difficult to overstate. The window in which gender schemas first begin to shape social reasoning opens before children turn four, long before formal schooling typically addresses equity in any systematic way. The findings argue for early childhood settings, nurseries, kindergartens, and caregiving environments, to actively promote counter-stereotypical representations of competence and fairness, particularly around resource sharing and leadership, rather than waiting for rigid prejudice to consolidate in middle childhood. Gender bias, the authors conclude, is not an inevitable consequence of development; it is a learned pattern, and what is learned early can be unlearned before it hardens. In a world where gender inequality continues to fuel conflict and injustice, the humble apples of a nursery-school experiment may mark one of the earliest and most promising points of intervention.

Subject of Research: The developmental emergence of gender schemas and gender bias in children's attribution of fair and unfair distributive actions.

Article Title: The Perception of Schemas and Gender Bias in the Attribution of Distributive Actions

Article References: La Rosa, V. L., Indiana, M. L., Borzì, E., Pirone, D., Sagone, E., Commodari, E., & Geraci, A. (2026). The Perception of Schemas and Gender Bias in the Attribution of Distributive Actions. International Journal of Early Childhood. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-026-00539-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13158-026-00539-4

Keywords: gender bias, gender schemas, distributive justice, child development, fairness, social cognition, gender stereotypes, developmental psychology, in-group favoritism, early childhood education, prejudice, resource distribution

Computational thinking, a concept famously articulated by Jeannette Wing in 2006, refers to the ability to formulate and solve problems using models drawn from computer science. It encompasses abstraction, decomposition, generalisation, algorithmic thinking and evaluation, and it has been repeatedly linked to stronger problem-solving, pattern recognition and information selection. Because educational authorities now regard it as an essential competence, teacher educators face a pressing question: how do you cultivate computational thinking in people who will teach three- to six-year-olds, many of whom arrive at university with little or no programming background? The Spanish team behind StoryMat-Robot believed the answer might lie not in code alone, but in stories.

The premise of the project is deceptively simple. A StoryMat-Robot is a playful, interactive narrative starring a robot, which must move through a physical space, typically a mat decorated with settings, characters and obstacles drawn from an adapted story. The narrative must be coherently sequenced, synchronising the plot’s progression with the robot’s trajectory, while the robot overcomes playful challenges tied to the storyline. Participants in the study worked in groups of four or five to produce 38 such proposals, adapting works ranging from Hansel and Gretel, The Three Little Pigs and The Wizard of Oz to animated films such as Ratatouille, Up and Madagascar. Roughly 60 percent of the designs were based on children’s literary texts and 40 percent on films.

What makes the design process cognitively rich is the way it forces several distinct skills to operate simultaneously. Translating a plot into a visual, physical format demands abstraction: students must select the most relevant story elements, represent them graphically as a robot pathway, and adapt characters while preserving their defining traits. Breaking the storyline into narrative sequences, scalable challenges and structured robot movements exercises decomposition. Maintaining aesthetic and stylistic coherence with the original work, whether two-dimensional, three-dimensional or realistic, mirrors generalisation, and segmenting the story into curriculum-aligned educational challenges with clear objectives, feedback and timing draws directly on algorithmic thinking. Layered over all of this are transmedia competences, as students integrate digital resources, augmented reality applications and artificial intelligence tools into their mats.

To evaluate what the finished products revealed about their creators’ thinking, the researchers designed and validated a 24-indicator instrument organised into four dimensions and scored on a four-point rubric, from ‘not at all adequate’ to ‘very adequate’. Three independent raters, including an external researcher, assessed every StoryMat-Robot, achieving strong inter-rater reliability with an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.874. An exploratory factor analysis confirmed the instrument’s validity, with three factors explaining 64.9 percent of the variance and a high internal consistency of alpha equal to 0.946. Statistical comparisons between literary-based and film-based designs employed the Mann-Whitney U test, complemented by effect sizes and confidence intervals.

The findings were encouraging across the board. Overall adequacy reached moderate-to-high levels, with decomposition scoring highest at 3.36, followed closely by algorithmic thinking at 3.34 and abstraction at 3.26, while generalisation lagged slightly at 2.98. The strongest single feature was the incorporation of educational challenges appropriate for early childhood education, rated at 3.69, suggesting that the trainee teachers excelled at embedding pattern-recognition tasks and age-appropriate problems into their narratives. In one adaptation of The Three Little Pigs, children were asked to select building materials; in the Ratatouille mat, they collected ingredients for the traditional dish. Students also showed a strong ability to adapt characters to the interactive format while preserving the essence of the original stories.

Interesting differences emerged between the two source materials. Designs based on literary texts proved more robust in spatial organisation: the logic of the robot’s pathways, the scaling of challenges, the alignment of tasks with the educational level and the overall mat design all scored significantly higher, likely because short, simple stories such as Hansel and Gretel often contain explicit routes that students could transfer directly onto the mat. Film-based designs, by contrast, were richer in digital integration, scoring higher on the use of artificial intelligence resources, the creation of augmented reality elements aligned with the narrative, the relevance of educational objectives, the functionality of digital tools and the inclusion of assessment procedures. The researchers attribute this to the greater multimodality of audiovisual discourse, which seems to prime designers toward technological enrichment and stronger pedagogical framing.

Not every dimension flourished equally. Generalisation proved the weakest component, and the integration of coding cards explaining the robot’s movement sequences was rated particularly low at 1.90 overall, revealing that trainee teachers struggle to make programming patterns explicit and transferable. The researchers also caution that the statistically significant differences between literary and film-based designs carried small or even negligible effect sizes, meaning neither format is categorically superior. Rather, the near-uniform presence of computational thinking skills across both groups suggests that the co-design process itself, grounded in Design-Based Learning, is the active ingredient. The study’s limitations are acknowledged candidly: it took place in a single institutional context, computational thinking was inferred from products rather than measured directly with pre- and post-tests, and students chose their own source works, a potential confounding factor.

The implications reach beyond one teacher-education classroom. The study reinforces a growing body of evidence that narrative creation, digital storytelling and educational robotics are powerful vehicles for computational thinking, and it demonstrates that these can be fused into a single, pedagogically meaningful activity rather than treated as separate strands. Because the resulting mats are ready-made classroom resources, the benefits flow in two directions: future teachers practise abstraction, decomposition and algorithmic sequencing, while the young children who eventually use the mats encounter the same skills through play. The research team now proposes testing the StoryMat-Robots with actual early childhood pupils aged three to six, to measure their influence on learning, motivation and computational thinking. If those trials succeed, the humble story mat may become a standard fixture in the effort to raise a generation that thinks computationally before it can even write its own name.

Subject of Research: Developing computational thinking in prospective early childhood teachers through robot-based transmedia storytelling design

Article Title: StoryMat-Robot: From Activating Narrative and Transmedia Competences in Prospective Teachers to the Development of Computational Thinking

Article References: StoryMat-Robot: From Activating Narrative and Transmedia Competences in Prospective Teachers to the Development of Computational Thinking. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-026-00544-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13158-026-00544-7

Keywords: computational thinking, educational robotics, transmedia storytelling, teacher education, early childhood education, narrative competence, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, algorithmic thinking, abstraction, decomposition, design-based learning

The study, conducted by Naji Kortam and Soheer Nabil-Hanna of the Biology Education Department at the Academic Arab College for Education in Haifa, was designed as a single-site interpretive qualitative case study. The researchers worked with a kindergarten class of 35 children, from whom 20 focal participants were selected for closer observation. Over the course of a researcher-facilitated, inquiry-oriented learning-garden unit, the team gathered data through semi-structured group interviews and through both participant and non-participant observations conducted before, during, and after the unit. This triangulated approach allowed them to track not just what children said about plants, but how their talk and actions changed as the garden unit unfolded.

The analytical engine of the study was inductive, interpretive qualitative content analysis, focused on three interlocking dimensions: plant-related sensemaking, inquiry practices, and curiosity episodes. Rather than testing a predefined hypothesis, the researchers let patterns emerge from the data, coding children’s explanations, questions, predictions, and moments of wonder as they appeared in transcripts and field notes. This methodological choice matters, because curiosity research in early childhood has long suffered from a definitional problem. As earlier work by Jirout and Klahr famously noted, children’s scientific curiosity has been an elusive concept in search of an operational definition. By watching curiosity happen in real time, in a real garden, Kortam and Nabil-Hanna offer one of the most concrete answers yet.

The findings are striking in their specificity. As the garden unit progressed, the children’s explanations of how plants live and grow became measurably more sophisticated. Early in the unit, explanations tended to be generic and vague. By the end, children were grounding their accounts in specific growth conditions: soil, air, heat, and season. A child who might once have said simply that plants need water could now articulate that a seedling in shaded soil grows differently from one in full sun, or that seasonal temperature changes affect what the garden can produce. This shift from generic to evidence-referenced reasoning is exactly the kind of conceptual development that early science educators hope to see, and it emerged not from formal instruction but from sustained, hands-on engagement with living things.

Equally important, the study documented how genuine inquiry practices became visible in children’s everyday talk and action. The researchers identified four signature behaviors: making predictions about what would happen in the garden, asking child-initiated why and how questions, comparing outcomes across different conditions, and taking simple measurements. These are not trivial accomplishments for five-year-olds. Prediction requires holding a mental model and committing to its consequences. Comparison requires recognizing that conditions can be varied deliberately. Measurement, even in its simplest forms, introduces the idea that claims about the world can be quantified. The garden, in other words, functioned as an authentic laboratory where the core epistemic practices of science arose naturally from the task of keeping plants alive.

Curiosity itself, the study’s central construct, showed up in three observable forms. Children displayed overt wonder, moments of visible surprise and delight at what the garden revealed. They sustained their engagement with uncertainty, returning repeatedly to questions they could not immediately answer rather than abandoning them. And they connected their garden experiences to prior experiences and to information resources, drawing on family gardening, books, and conversations to make sense of what they observed. This tripartite picture gives researchers and teachers something they have lacked: a practical rubric for recognizing curiosity when it happens, rather than merely assuming it exists because children seem engaged.

The study’s design principles may prove to be its most immediately useful contribution. Kortam and Nabil-Hanna distilled their findings into three design principles for inquiry-oriented kindergarten science. First, planned contrasts across conditions: children should encounter plants growing in deliberately different circumstances, such as sun versus shade or watered versus dry soil, because contrast makes causal variables perceptible. Second, repeated revisits over time: because plants change slowly, children need multiple encounters with the same garden across days and weeks, allowing their predictions to be tested against unfolding evidence. Third, open-ended questioning supported by simple tools: adults should ask questions that invite exploration rather than recall, and children should have access to simple instruments such as rulers and magnifiers that extend their senses. None of these principles requires expensive equipment or specialist training, which makes them genuinely scalable.

The theoretical stakes of the work extend beyond the kindergarten fence. Curiosity has become a hot topic in cognitive science, with recent reviews in outlets such as Nature Reviews Psychology cataloguing how curiosity drives learning across ages and contexts. But most of that literature studies curiosity in controlled settings, far from the messy environments where children actually live. This study flips the perspective, asking not how curiosity can be measured in the lab but how it is enacted in the wild of everyday classroom activity. The answer, it turns out, is that curiosity is deeply social and deeply situated. It depends on talk with peers and adults, on materials that invite manipulation, and on questions that remain genuinely open rather than leading to predetermined answers.

The choice of a learning garden as the research site is also significant within a growing international movement. Garden-based learning has attracted increasing research attention, with studies examining everything from teacher roles in kindergarten foraging activities to the connections between risky nature play and science learning in Australian bush kinders. What this new study adds is a fine-grained account of the cognitive and epistemic work happening beneath the surface of garden activity. Where earlier research often emphasized affective and social benefits, such as connection to nature and well-being, Kortam and Nabil-Hanna demonstrate that a garden can be a site of rigorous scientific sensemaking, provided it is organized as structured small-group inquiry rather than free play alone.

For educators and policymakers, the message is both encouraging and demanding. Encouraging, because the study shows that the foundations of scientific literacy, evidence-based explanation, prediction, comparison, and measurement, can be built in ordinary kindergartens with nothing more exotic than seeds, soil, and thoughtful adult questioning. Demanding, because those outcomes did not appear spontaneously. They required deliberate design: contrasts planned into the garden layout, schedules that allowed revisiting, and facilitators skilled at keeping questions open. Curiosity, the study suggests, is not a fixed trait that some children bring to school and others lack. It is a practice that environments either nourish or starve. In a sunlit patch of ground in an Israeli kindergarten, twenty children showed what nourished curiosity looks like: wonder in their eyes, evidence in their explanations, and questions that kept pulling them back to the garden day after day.

Subject of Research: How five- to six-year-old children enact scientific curiosity, inquiry, and plant-related sensemaking in a kindergarten learning garden.

Article Title: Enacting Scientific Curiosity in a Kindergarten Learning Garden: Children’s Inquiry, Talk, and Plant Sensemaking

Article References: Enacting Scientific Curiosity in a Kindergarten Learning Garden: Children’s Inquiry, Talk, and Plant Sensemaking. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02348-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02348-9

Keywords: scientific curiosity, kindergarten science, learning garden, early childhood education, inquiry-based learning, plant sensemaking, garden-based learning, science education, qualitative case study, children's inquiry, preschool learning, wonder and exploration

The study, conducted by Perıhan Tugba Seker and Ozge Savas of Uşak University’s Department of Preschool Education, followed 21 children aged 60 to 72 months attending a public kindergarten in central Uşak during the 2020–2021 academic year. The research adopted a qualitative single-case study design, a methodology chosen precisely because it allows researchers to examine a bounded, real-life classroom phenomenon in depth without manipulating children’s natural behavior. Ethical approval was granted by the Uşak University Social and Human Sciences Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee, and informed written consent was obtained from parents before data collection began.

Crucially, the topic of investigation was not selected by the researchers or the teacher. During an outdoor recess in early November, a small group of children noticed ants carrying breadcrumbs toward a soil mound and their questions multiplied rapidly: Where were they taking the crumbs? Did ants freeze in the rain? How did they find their way without getting lost? Was there a giant city beneath the soil? The researchers documented these spontaneous exchanges in anecdotal records and recognized in them the authentic spark of curiosity that would anchor the project. This genesis matters methodologically: rather than imposing an externally designed unit, the team traced how children’s pre-existing interests could be channeled into structured, multidimensional scientific inquiry.

The project was organized around the three canonical phases of the Project Approach as articulated by Katz and Chard and later developed by Helm and Katz. In the initiation phase, spanning the first two weeks, children’s prior knowledge and misconceptions were elicited through free drawing and collaborative discussion, and co-constructed concept maps were used to visualize initial hypotheses about ant anatomy, behavior, and ecology. The fieldwork phase, from weeks three to five, formed the analytical core of the intervention: children conducted guided nature walks, observed ants through magnifying glasses and digital microscopes, documented findings through field mapping, and collaboratively designed and built model ant farms, embedding engineering design and mathematical measurement of movement patterns and distances into authentic contexts. The finalization phase in weeks six and seven centered on reflection and public sharing, with children revising their concept maps and preparing a community exhibition of their work.

Sessions ran three days per week for 45 to 60 minutes, totaling approximately 21 structured project sessions, and were mapped deliberately onto the constructivist, child-centered Turkish National Preschool Education Program. The educators’ role was carefully calibrated. Rather than lecturing or dispensing answers, the teacher functioned as facilitator and co-investigator, deploying open-ended questions—such as asking what might happen if the texture of an ant’s path changed—to stimulate prediction and solution design, while enriching classroom learning centers with magnifiers, tweezers, field journals, and art supplies as the project’s needs evolved.

The most dramatic findings concerned the dismantling of anthropomorphic misconceptions. Before the project, interviews and drawings revealed that children largely interpreted ant biology through the lens of human life. They imagined ant families with mothers, fathers, and children, insisted that ants never sleep because they always work, and variously credited the insects with anywhere from two to seven legs. After the intervention, post-project interviews documented a profound conceptual shift: children correctly deployed scientific terminology including colony, larva, and maze-like chambers, and described accurate biological structures and behaviors. The researchers argue this demonstrates that preschoolers can master genuinely complex scientific vocabulary and concepts when those concepts are explored deeply rather than treated superficially.

Procedural skills evolved in parallel. Early in the project, children could perceive no diversity within the insect world, claiming there were only black ants or inventing fictional species such as ants made of iron. By the finalization stage, they had progressed from global descriptions to fine-grained, attribute-based classification, accurately distinguishing ecological and behavioral roles such as queen ants, worker ants, carpenter ants, and wood ants based on physical form and function. Children’s understanding of the antenna underwent a particularly striking transformation. Initially described as the thing that runs the television or simply as ears, the antenna was reconceptualized after the project as a multifunctional sensory organ through which ants find their way, avoid danger, hear, and taste—a shift the researchers interpret as evidence of transition from passive questioning to causal, evidence-based explanation.

The integrated STEAM design proved central to these gains, and the authors emphasize that the arts functioned as far more than decoration. When presented with a design challenge inspired by the temperature-regulated architecture of ant nests, children used salt ceramics to sculpt intricate, interconnected three-dimensional models of warehouse systems, verbally attributing functions and names to each component. This artistic modeling acted as a cognitive and symbolic language, allowing children to translate abstract biological findings into tangible engineered products, and to test and communicate mental models that verbal language alone could not yet carry. Robot designs inspired by ant body structure, antennae, and legs further extended the engineering dimension of the inquiry.

Collaboration and communication developed alongside cognitive skills. Because workshop tasks such as constructing interconnected colony pathways were too complex for any single child, cooperative problem-solving became a practical necessity, and the researchers observed a marked reduction in egocentric behavior as children negotiated design choices and built consensus. The culminating public exhibition, for which each child’s artifacts were systematically labeled, saw children confidently explaining their work and every structural detail to an audience, reinforcing scientific communication and metacognitive reflection. A spontaneous home-school learning loop also emerged: children carried their inquiries into daily life, identifying and naming real ants encountered outdoors according to their morphological traits, and sharing their observations with parents—an authentic cross-contextual transfer of knowledge that turned family involvement into an active support mechanism for early scientific literacy.

The authors acknowledge limitations, including winter weather that constrained outdoor observation of ants and forced some sessions to rely on simulated ant farms and digital resources, as well as administrative constraints that prevented families from physically attending the final exhibition, which had to be shared through photographs and video. Even so, the study concludes with a clear message for educators, teacher-training programs, and policymakers: when long-term, interest-driven projects are integrated with a STEAM framework and supported by responsive adult scaffolding, young children are fully capable of fine-grained observation, attribute-based classification, higher-order causal questioning, and collaborative engineering design. The lowly ant, it turns out, was all the invitation these preschool scientists needed.

Subject of Research: Development of scientific inquiry skills in preschool children through a project-based STEAM investigation of ants

Article Title: Preschool children develop scientific inquiry skills through STEM based investigations

Article References: Preschool children develop scientific inquiry skills through STEM based investigations. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02127-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02127-z

Keywords: early childhood education, STEM education, STEAM, project-based learning, scientific inquiry, preschool, curiosity, science misconceptions, ants, Uşak University, qualitative case study, Discover Education

The study centers on what researchers call early math precursors, a framework developed by Hynes-Berry, Chen, and Abel that identifies four foundational pre-mathematical skills: attributes, comparison, change, and pattern. Attributes involve noticing the properties of objects, such as color, size, texture, and quantity. Comparison encompasses recognizing similarities and differences. Change refers to joining, separating, and altering objects and quantities. Pattern captures sequences, regularities, and routines. Because these precursors precede formal numeracy, they are considered critical stepping stones toward later quantification, arithmetic, and mathematical reasoning.

The stakes are considerable. Longitudinal research has shown that early numeracy skills trigger snowballing effects, compounding children’s mathematical knowledge across elementary and middle school grades and even supporting socio-emotional development and literacy. A 2025 longitudinal meta-analysis in the Journal of Educational Psychology confirmed the strong predictive power of early numeracy for later mathematics achievement. Yet despite this evidence, most research on early math has focused on preschoolers, leaving a significant gap in understanding what mathematical support looks like for infants and toddlers, particularly in the informal environments where very young children actually spend their time.

To address this gap, Campana and Kociubuk conducted a qualitative descriptive study using naturalistic observations of six video-recorded storytimes at different branches of a large urban public library system. The recordings captured six library educators, 63 children aged zero to three, and 61 caregivers, including both the formal storytime programs and the open play sessions before and after. The researchers applied a deductive coding schema based on the four early math precursors, supplemented by inductive coding of the methods, strategies, and resources educators used. Intercoder reliability was strong, with a Krippendorff’s alpha of 0.802, and the team reinforced trustworthiness through prolonged engagement, data triangulation across branches and educators, and investigator triangulation.

The findings were striking in their breadth. All four early math precursors appeared across every one of the six storytimes, and nearly all of the subcodes within each precursor were observed at least once per session. Attribute and comparison were the most frequently observed, with comparison subcodes appearing an average of 60 times per storytime and attribute subcodes an average of 57 times. The most common specific elements were physical attributes, temporal and spatial attributes, and similarities comparisons. Pattern was the least observed broad precursor, averaging 32 appearances, a result the authors note aligns with prior research finding that patterns are present but not prominent in early math curricula, possibly because educators receive limited professional development on pattern content for very young children.

The researchers identified five broad methods through which the precursors emerged: reading books, singing songs, chanting rhymes, talking during introductions and transitions, and free play. In one reading example, an educator sharing the book Ten Little Fingers, Two Small Hands prompted caregivers to hold up fingers, count aloud, and wiggle hands, weaving together attribute vocabulary, quantity demonstration, comparison of hands and fingers, and the number sequence from one to ten. In a singing activity about falling autumn leaves, children handled leaf manipulatives while exploring size, color, quantity, and spatial location, taking two leaves from a basket one by one, and letting the leaves fall to the ground, engaging all four precursors in a single song.

Chanting rhymes proved especially rich in attribute vocabulary. In one recurring chant, an educator led children and caregivers through saying goodbye quickly, slowly, high, low, quietly, and loudly, using exaggerated gestures and vocal variation to reinforce opposites and physical concepts while the routine structure of opening and closing each session with the same chant reinforced pattern recognition. Even transitions between activities carried mathematical weight: when an educator introduced the song Go In and Out the Window, the spatial opposites in the lyrics, the ordered steps, and the promise of repeating the song weekly all supported attributes, comparison, and patterns. During free play, caregivers naturally extended the precursors, asking children to count train cars, name colors, explain that green means go and red means stop, or negotiate that holding one more toy meant putting one down, while a baby chasing a programmable Bee-Bot robot demonstrated change through tracking movement and altering her environment by moving blocks from its path.

Two strategies ran through every method: the use of math-related vocabulary and embodied learning, in which physical movements and sensory experiences anchor abstract concepts. The researchers interpreted their findings through Jerome Bruner’s Three Modes of Representation and Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Bruner described how children progress from enactive representation, learning through motor responses and manipulation in the first year of life, to iconic representation through images during ages one to six, and finally to symbolic representation through abstract language around age seven. Storytime practices, from finger counting to leaf waving to toy manipulation, aligned squarely with the enactive and iconic modes appropriate for babies and toddlers, while math vocabulary, though symbolic, was consistently paired with concrete representations. Vygotsky’s theory illuminated the adults’ role: educators and caregivers scaffolded experiences children could not access independently, operating within each child’s zone of proximal development.

The caregiver dimension carries particular practical significance. Research indicates that many parents feel anxious or insecure about mathematics, and the quality of adult support has an outsized impact on children’s later mathematical success. By modeling precursor-rich interactions during storytimes, library educators may be training caregivers to replicate these scaffolds at home, multiplying the impact far beyond the library walls. The authors argue that early childhood organizations should treat the four precursors as a valuable framework, train educators in their use, encourage more intentional pairing of math vocabulary with embodied learning and manipulatives, and use family engagement efforts to build caregiver confidence in supporting early math.

The study does have limitations, including its small sample of six storytimes from a single library system, the absence of demographic and developmental data on participants, and reliance on video recordings that may have missed some behaviors. Future research, the authors suggest, should examine how the precursors appear in daycare classrooms, museums, and other settings, and test whether precursor training interventions improve educator knowledge and behavior. Still, the message for parents and educators is clear: the building blocks of mathematics are not found only in flashcards and counting drills. They are in the rhythm of a chant, the colors of autumn leaves, the clatter of toy trains, and the wiggling of ten little fingers, moments that a well-designed storytime delivers by the dozen.

Subject of Research: Early math precursors in public library storytimes for babies and toddlers

Article Title: Building a Strong Math Foundation: Supporting Early Math Precursors for Babies and Toddlers

Article References: Campana, K., & Kociubuk, J. (2026). Building a Strong Math Foundation: Supporting Early Math Precursors for Babies and Toddlers. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02351-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02351-0

Keywords: early math precursors, babies and toddlers, public library storytimes, early childhood education, math vocabulary, embodied learning, Zone of Proximal Development, Bruner modes of representation, caregivers, informal learning environments, Building, Strong

Drama in Education, often abbreviated as DiE, is a process-oriented approach in which children and teachers step into imagined roles and explore a story or problem from within. Pioneered by educators such as Dorothy Heathcote and Gavin Bolton, the method treats the classroom as a shared fictional world where learning emerges through participation rather than instruction. In China, where early childhood classrooms have traditionally been shaped by Confucian-influenced norms of teacher authority and structured repetition, imported pedagogies of this kind have often been viewed with scepticism. Previous scholarship has suggested that Western-originated approaches may encounter resistance or superficial adoption in Chinese contexts, raising the question of whether children genuinely engage with such methods or simply comply with them outwardly.

To answer that question, the research team turned to Ochs and Phillips’s educational policy borrowing theory, a framework that traces what happens when educational ideas travel across borders. The theory describes a cycle of borrowing that includes justification, translation, and, crucially, internalisation, the stage at which an imported practice becomes embedded in local understanding. Most studies of policy borrowing focus on teachers, administrators or official documents. This study is unusual in that it asks whether internalisation can be observed in the children themselves, treating five- and six-year-olds as capable interpreters of a borrowed pedagogy rather than passive recipients of it.

The researchers adopted a qualitative case study design centred on a single Drama in Education activity in a mainland Chinese early childhood classroom. Rather than relying solely on adult observation, they used a draw-and-tell approach, a well-established technique in early childhood research in which children produce drawings and then explain them verbally. Because young children’s thinking often exceeds their writing ability, drawing combined with self-narration provides a developmentally appropriate channel for them to express how they understood an experience. After the drama activity concluded, the children drew pictures related to what they had experienced and talked through their drawings with the researchers, offering accounts of what the drama had meant to them.

The resulting dataset, consisting of children’s drawings alongside their verbal explanations, was subjected to thematic analysis, a systematic method for identifying recurring patterns of meaning across qualitative data. The analysis revealed several distinct forms of creative understanding among the participating children. Some children revisited the drama by depicting key moments and characters, demonstrating that they had retained the narrative structure of the experience. Others went further, interpreting the events of the drama and connecting them to situations from their own lives. A third pattern involved reconstruction and extension: children added new characters, altered outcomes, or invented scenes that had never occurred in the classroom drama, effectively continuing the story on their own terms.

This last finding carries particular weight for the debate over pedagogical transfer. If the children had merely reproduced the drama, their drawings would have mirrored the classroom activity closely, suggesting surface-level engagement. Instead, the evidence points to a deeper cognitive process. The children integrated their personal experiences, prior knowledge and imaginative capacities into their retellings, transforming the drama into something partly their own. In the language of the study, they did not simply reproduce the drama but reconstructed and extended it. That behaviour is precisely what theories of creative learning would predict when a pedagogy genuinely takes hold, and it suggests that Drama in Education can be meaningfully enacted within a local Chinese classroom rather than remaining an imported ritual.

The study also contributes an exploratory conceptualisation of children’s internalisation within educational policy borrowing theory. By treating children’s creative understanding as evidence of internalisation, the researchers extend a framework normally applied at the level of institutions and systems down to the level of individual learners. This move has practical implications. Policymakers and curriculum designers who import Western pedagogies into East Asian contexts often measure success through teacher training, curriculum documents or observable classroom behaviours. The present study suggests that children’s own artefacts and narratives, such as drawings and accompanying explanations, can serve as an additional and arguably more direct indicator of whether an imported approach has genuinely been absorbed.

The findings arrive at a moment of heightened policy interest in creativity across China. National education outlines issued over the past fifteen years have repeatedly emphasised innovation and creative talent, and recent scholarship has debated why Chinese schooling has historically struggled to cultivate creative thinking alongside strong foundational skills. Drama in Education has been promoted in Chinese early childhood literature as a vehicle for developing language, emotional understanding, peer interaction and creativity, and several recent case studies have explored its use with picture books in kindergartens. However, much of this literature evaluates outcomes from the adult perspective. By centring children’s voices, the new study addresses a methodological gap and provides the children’s perspective on how a Western-originated pedagogy may be internalised in Chinese early childhood education.

The researchers are careful to frame the work as a single qualitative case study rather than a generalisable experiment. The data, which are not publicly available due to ethical restrictions but can be requested from the authors, come from one classroom and one drama activity, and the study was approved by the institutional ethics committee of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia with informed consent obtained from all participants and their parents or legal guardians. Nevertheless, the case offers a counterexample to the assumption that Confucian-influenced classrooms inevitably resist Western pedagogies. The children’s responses indicate that when a drama activity is enacted locally, young learners can engage with it in ways that support creative understanding, revisiting, interpreting and rebuilding the experience through their own symbolic and narrative resources.

For educators, the study underscores the value of listening to children after an activity, not just during it. The draw-and-tell method demonstrates that even five-year-olds can articulate sophisticated understandings of a learning experience when given an accessible medium. For researchers of educational transfer, it suggests that the internalisation stage of policy borrowing is visible at the classroom floor level, in crayon drawings and children’s spoken explanations, and not only in ministry documents or teacher interviews. And for advocates of Drama in Education, the evidence provides reassurance that the approach can travel: transplanted into a Chinese kindergarten, it did not lose its essence but was taken up by children who made the drama their own, extending its storylines with the raw material of their own lives and imaginations.

Subject of Research: How five- to six-year-old children in a Chinese kindergarten internalise Drama in Education experiences through creative understanding, examined via a draw-and-tell qualitative case study.

Article Title: Children’s Creative Understanding in Drama in Education: Evidence from Draw-and-Tell in a Chinese Early Childhood Context

Article References: Children’s Creative Understanding in Drama in Education: Evidence from Draw-and-Tell in a Chinese Early Childhood Context. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-026-00551-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13158-026-00551-8

Keywords: Drama in Education, creative understanding, early childhood education, educational policy borrowing, draw-and-tell method, China, kindergarten, qualitative case study, children's drawings, pedagogy transfer, creativity, thematic analysis

Point-line interlocking blocks are a distinctive construction material in which pieces connect through point-and-line junctions rather than through the stud-based coupling familiar from plastic bricks or the simple stacking of wooden blocks. This geometry changes what a child must understand and do to build successfully. The connections demand finer motor control, an appreciation of how linear elements can define edges and frames, and the ability to plan structures in which points of contact carry the load. Because these blocks are widespread in kindergartens, particularly in China, yet lacked any validated assessment instrument, the researchers set out to fill a genuine gap in the measurement literature.

The team collected data from 350 children aged 43 to 66 months attending kindergartens in Xi’an, a sample spanning the age range in which construction play undergoes rapid developmental change. Each child’s block constructions were scored with the new scale, which was designed to be brief enough for practical classroom use while remaining sensitive to the differentiated levels of ability that emerge across the preschool years. The developers grounded the instrument in decades of research showing that block construction is not a single undifferentiated skill but a constellation of abilities that unfold in predictable developmental sequences.

Using exploratory factor analysis followed by confirmatory factor analysis, the researchers arrived at a 16-item scale organized into three factors: construction skills, representational ability, and aesthetic quality. Construction skills capture the technical mastery of joining, balancing, and stabilizing pieces. Representational ability reflects the degree to which a child’s build stands for something, a tower that is meant to be a castle or an arrangement that depicts a bridge, echoing the long-standing finding that block constructions evolve from sensorimotor exploration toward symbolic expression. Aesthetic quality, the third factor, acknowledges that children’s buildings differ in symmetry, proportion, and visual coherence, dimensions that research on the development of aesthetic preference suggests emerge as cognitive capacities mature.

The statistical evidence for this three-factor structure was strong. The confirmatory model demonstrated good fit, with a comparative fit index of 0.99, a Tucker-Lewis index of 0.99, a root mean square error of approximation of 0.06, and a weighted root mean square residual of 0.75, values that meet or exceed conventional benchmarks for acceptable model fit. Standardized factor loadings ranged from 0.65 to 0.96, indicating that every item contributed meaningfully to its intended factor. In plain terms, the data showed that the 16 items hang together in exactly the way the theory predicted, and that the three dimensions are empirically distinguishable rather than a single blurry general score.

Reliability, the consistency of measurement, was equally robust. The scale showed strong internal consistency, with reliability coefficients ranging from 0.84 to 0.94 across its components. Coefficients in this range mean that scores are stable enough to support individual-level decisions, such as identifying a child who may benefit from additional support or documenting growth over the course of an intervention. The authors also attended to the ordinal nature of their rating data, drawing on contemporary methodological guidance for estimating reliability with Likert-type and ordinal item response data rather than relying solely on older approaches that can misstate precision.

Validity was examined through criterion-related evidence. PLIB scores were significantly associated with two established measures, the Block Construction Scoring Scale and the CA Block Construction Level Assessment Scale, demonstrating that the new instrument converges with existing assessments of block construction while offering its own advantages. Those advantages include brevity, a level-based structure suited to tracking developmental progress, and a focus on point-line interlocking materials that existing scales, most of which were designed for unit blocks or structured assembly tasks, do not directly address. The result is a tool that is both psychometrically defensible and practically usable in real kindergarten settings.

The significance of a validated block construction measure extends well beyond psychometrics. A substantial body of research links early block play to later academic outcomes. Studies have associated the complexity of three-year-olds’ block building with later spatial and mathematical skills, shown that block-building interventions can develop spatial skills, and demonstrated through randomized controlled trials that structured block play can enhance preschool children’s mathematics performance and executive functioning. Longitudinal work has connected preschool block construction with reading and mathematics abilities in early elementary school, including among children with disabilities. Spatial assembly performance in preschoolers has been shown to relate to early mathematical skill, and researchers have argued that spatial and mathematical abilities are intertwined across the preschool years.

Block play also supports capacities that are harder to quantify. Observational research has documented the spatial language children use during block play, the logico-mathematical thinking that emerges when young children experiment with blocks and inclines, and the abstract thinking that video-based studies have linked to sustained construction activity. Work on creativity has found that block play can foster divergent thinking, and studies of make-believe and pretend play situate construction within the broader architecture of executive function development. Teachers’ verbal scaffolding has been shown to influence the complexity of preschoolers’ constructions, and the block area has been described as a site where material and human actors interact in ways that shape learning. A reliable measure of construction ability gives educators a way to observe and document this rich developmental terrain systematically.

For practitioners, the PLIB promises a way to move beyond impressionistic judgments about whether a child is a good builder. Because the scale is level-based, it can locate a child’s current constructions along a developmental continuum and reveal which of the three dimensions, technical skill, symbolic representation, or aesthetic sensibility, is advancing or lagging. That granularity could inform curriculum planning, guide the placement of materials and prompts in the block area, and support communication with families about what block play is actually teaching. For researchers, the validated three-factor structure provides a foundation for studying how point-line interlocking construction develops, how it relates to spatial cognition and mathematics, and whether interventions designed around these blocks produce measurable gains.

The study was funded by a National Education Science Planning Ministry of Education key project focused on kindergarten teachers in western rural China, reflecting a broader policy interest in strengthening early childhood education quality in the region. The authors report no conflicts of interest, and the work involved a large collaborative team spanning preschool education, special education, curriculum and instruction, and the arts. As interlocking construction toys continue to proliferate in classrooms worldwide, the PLIB offers a timely answer to a deceptively simple question: how do we know what a child’s block building reveals about the child? With this scale, educators and scientists now have a validated, practical instrument for finding out.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of the Point-Line Interlocking Block Construction Scale for assessing preschool children's block construction ability

Article Title: A Validated Tool for Assessing Point-Line Interlocking Block Construction in Preschool Children

Article References: A Validated Tool for Assessing Point-Line Interlocking Block Construction in Preschool Children. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02321-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02321-6

Keywords: block play, preschool children, point-line interlocking blocks, scale validation, psychometrics, confirmatory factor analysis, early childhood education, spatial skills, construction skills, reliability, child development, assessment tool

Dialogic reading is not simply reading aloud. It is a structured, interactive technique in which the adult shifts from being a narrator to being a prompter, listener, and coach, encouraging the child to become the storyteller. The approach was first formalized in the late 1980s by researchers who demonstrated that systematic prompting during picture book reading could measurably accelerate young children’s language development. Decades of subsequent research, including systematic reviews and cluster-randomized intervention trials, have supported its benefits for vocabulary growth, narrative skill, and emergent literacy across diverse populations, including children from low-income families and children with disabilities.

Two complementary frameworks organize the technique. The PEER sequence breaks each interaction into a repeatable cycle: Prompt the child with a question, Evaluate the child’s response, Expand on it by rephrasing and adding information, and Repeat the prompt to reinforce learning. The CROWD taxonomy specifies the kinds of prompts adults can use: Completion prompts that invite the child to finish a sentence, Recall prompts that connect the story to earlier pages, Open-ended questions that encourage elaboration, Wh-questions that target vocabulary and detail, and Distancing prompts that link the book’s content to the child’s own life. Together, PEER and CROWD give caregivers and practitioners a concrete behavioral script for maximizing the linguistic payoff of shared reading.

The challenge has always been training. Early intervention providers, who work with infants and toddlers with developmental delays or disabilities and their families, often receive little formal instruction in dialogic reading, and traditional professional development—workshops, coaching visits, printed materials—is expensive and difficult to deliver at scale, particularly across the geographically dispersed communities of regions like the Mountain West. Against that backdrop, the study’s author, Mark Guiberson of the University of Nevada, Reno, asked whether the tutorial format families already use—short digital videos and social media posts—could carry the instructional load.

The study used a survey-based design involving 116 early intervention providers drawn primarily from the Mountain West region of the United States. Participants first reported their current use of PEER and CROWD strategies before viewing a set of digital media tutorials. They then viewed the tutorials, which presented the dialogic reading frameworks in a social media–style format enhanced with pictures and captions, and reported their prospective intention to use the strategies in their own practice going forward. The survey also captured participants’ beliefs about the usefulness of social media in early intervention work with families.

The results revealed a clear pattern. PEER strategies were the most frequently reported strategies already in use before the tutorial exposure, and they remained highly endorsed for future use—suggesting that the core prompt-evaluate-expand-repeat cycle is relatively familiar to providers, or at least easier to adopt. The CROWD strategies, by contrast, showed the greatest increase in reported prospective use after the tutorials. In other words, the tutorials appeared to fill a specific instructional gap: providers knew how to keep a conversation going with a child but were less practiced in deploying the diverse question types that give dialogic reading its depth, and the digital tutorials moved the needle on exactly that dimension.

Statistically, the study detected a significant difference between participants’ reported current strategy use and their reported prospective use after viewing the tutorials, with a medium effect size. While self-reported intentions do not guarantee behavioral change, a medium effect on prospective adoption is a meaningful signal for a brief, scalable intervention. Professional development research has long struggled with the problem of transfer—getting practitioners to actually integrate new techniques into everyday routines—and any low-cost format that reliably shifts reported practice intentions is worth closer examination.

Perhaps the most forward-looking finding concerns format preferences. Participants indicated that they believed digital tutorials and social media could be useful tools in their work with families, and—strikingly—they slightly preferred the picture-and-caption-enhanced social media format over traditional-style videos. This preference aligns with broader research on digital media consumption, including studies comparing engagement with short-form video content against conventional long-form videos on platforms like YouTube, as well as survey data showing that large numbers of adults turn to platforms such as YouTube for children’s content and how-to instruction. The implication is that the medium practitioners and parents already gravitate toward may be the medium most effective for delivering evidence-based parenting and teaching strategies.

The technical significance of the study lies in its framing of social media not as a competitor to early language intervention but as a delivery channel for it. Prior work has established that shared interactive book reading interventions benefit young children with disabilities, and that video-based online training can help educators learn to implement dialogic reading. The present study extends this line of evidence to early intervention providers specifically and to the social media aesthetic specifically—suggesting that micro-learning assets optimized for feeds, with images and captions doing much of the communicative work, may outperform conventional instructional video in acceptance and perceived usefulness. This matters for equity as well: families and providers in rural or under-resourced communities, where access to in-person coaching is limited, often have robust mobile internet access, making social media tutorials a distribution mechanism that bypasses traditional barriers to professional development.

The findings also carry practical implications for program design. Head Start and early intervention systems, which serve large numbers of children from low-income families, have long sought efficient ways to support caregivers’ use of language-rich interactions at home. If brief social media tutorials can reliably raise providers’ intended use of CROWD prompts, those providers could, in turn, model and share the same tutorial content with parents during home visits or through program social media accounts, creating a multiplier effect. The study’s author cautions that data are available only from the author on request and that future work will need to test actual implementation and child outcomes, but the direction is clear: the viral, thumb-scrolling format of modern social media may be one of the most promising tools yet for getting evidence-based storytime strategies into the hands of the adults who read with young children every day.

The theoretical roots of the study reach back to Whitehurst and colleagues’ original picture book reading experiments, which were later extended to day care settings in Mexico and to low-income families in the United States, establishing early on that the technique could travel across cultural and socioeconomic contexts. Subsequent work by Zevenbergen and Whitehurst showed that shared-reading interventions could even enrich the evaluative quality of children’s own narratives, suggesting that the benefits extend beyond vocabulary into broader expressive competence. The What Works Clearinghouse, which evaluates interventions for the Institute of Education Sciences, has issued dedicated reports on dialogic reading, underscoring its status as one of the few early literacy practices with a substantial evidence base behind it.

Against that backdrop, the question of how to train adults efficiently has become a research topic in its own right. A 2022 systematic review of the dialogic reading literature catalogued the growing variety of delivery methods, and more recent preliminary work by Fleury and colleagues demonstrated that video-based online training alone can help educators learn to implement the technique. The present study’s survey approach complements these intervention trials by capturing provider perceptions at scale, a methodological trade-off that trades behavioral measurement for breadth across a geographically dispersed sample.

The medium effect size reported in the study deserves some interpretive context. In education research, effect sizes in this range are generally considered practically meaningful, particularly for brief exposures that involve no coaching, no follow-up, and no incentive structure. The comparison of current versus prospective use is also a conservative test in one sense, since providers may have already been familiar with the frameworks through prior training, yet the tutorials still shifted reported intentions, most notably for the CROWD prompt types that require more nuanced questioning skills.

The preference for picture-and-caption-enhanced formats over traditional videos also connects to a broader design principle in adult learning: reducing cognitive load by pairing concise text with visual scaffolding. Social media posts built around images and captions can be consumed in seconds, revisited easily, and shared organically within professional networks, whereas conventional instructional videos demand sustained attention that busy providers may not have between home visits. The engagement literature on short-form versus long-form video suggests that attention economics increasingly favors the former, and instructional designers in early childhood fields appear to be taking note.

Finally, the study sits within a family-centered tradition in early intervention, in which providers act as coaches and capacity-builders for caregivers rather than as direct deliverers of all services. Meta-analytic work on family-centered care has linked this collaborative orientation to better parent and child outcomes, which makes provider fluency in dialogic reading doubly important: a provider who masters the strategies can model them for parents in real time. Digital tutorials that raise provider confidence and intention may therefore ripple outward into home environments where most early language learning actually occurs.

Subject of Research: Use of social media–based digital tutorials to train early intervention providers in dialogic reading strategies

Article Title: Social Media Meets Storytime: Teaching Dialogic Reading Strategies Through Digital Tutorials

Article References: Guiberson, M. (2026). Social Media Meets Storytime: Teaching Dialogic Reading Strategies Through Digital Tutorials. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02349-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02349-8

Keywords: dialogic reading, social media, digital tutorials, early intervention, language development, PEER strategy, CROWD prompts, professional development, early childhood education, shared book reading, literacy, micro-learning