The research team, led by Muthu Maheswaran and colleagues at the SRM School of Public Health, conducted their investigation through an interpretive paradigm, holding in-depth interviews with mothers of children aged two to six years. Crucially, the sample included both users and nonusers of Anganwadi services, allowing the researchers to capture the full spectrum of perceptions shaping enrollment decisions. Anganwadi workers were also interviewed, providing a dual perspective on the barriers and facilitators operating at the community level. Data were analysed thematically following Braun and Clarke’s framework, a rigorous qualitative methodology that involves systematic coding, theme generation, and iterative refinement of categories until coherent patterns emerge from the raw testimony.

What makes the study technically significant is its analytical scaffolding. The researchers guided their thematic analysis using Andersen’s behavioural model, a well-established health services framework that classifies utilization determinants into three categories: predisposing factors, enabling factors, and need-based factors. Predisposing factors include maternal education, sociocultural norms, and perceptions of class identity, all of which the study found to influence enrollment decisions in measurable ways. Enabling factors encompassed the physical proximity of Anganwadi Centres, trust in Anganwadi workers, and the play-based pedagogy that fostered children’s curiosity, socialization, and behavioural skills. Need-based factors, the third pillar of the model, reflected the developmental requirements of children that parents recognized and sought to address through preschool participation.

The Integrated Child Development Services scheme, under which these centres operate, is India’s cornerstone programme for early childhood care and education, delivered through a vast network of Anganwadi Centres across the country. Despite its extensive reach, enrollment and attendance remain stubbornly uneven, a disparity that has puzzled policymakers for decades. Understanding parental perceptions, barriers, and emerging motivations is therefore crucial to strengthening participation and advancing the National Education Policy 2020 goals, which emphasize equitable, play-based early childhood education. The Madurai study provides granular evidence on why some families embrace these services while others abstain, and why the calculus is shifting in unexpected directions.

Among the most technically interesting findings is the role of maternal education as a double-edged determinant. In conventional development narratives, higher maternal education correlates with greater utilization of formal health and education services, and this pattern held for many respondents. Yet the study uncovered a countercurrent: educated parents who might be expected to bypass Anganwadi preschools in favour of private English-medium alternatives instead preferred them for their pressure-free, child-centered environments. This deliberate preference reflects an emerging revaluation of public early childhood spaces, suggesting that as awareness of play-based pedagogy spreads, the class-based stigma attached to these centres may erode rather than deepen.

Sociocultural norms and perceptions of class identity emerged as powerful predisposing factors shaping enrollment decisions. Some mothers perceived the Anganwadi Centres as spaces associated with particular socioeconomic groups, a perception that deterred enrollment even when services were accessible and of reasonable quality. This finding underscores a technical point about service utilization that quantitative surveys often miss: the subjective meaning families attach to a service can be as decisive as its objective characteristics. Proximity, by contrast, functioned as a robust enabling factor, with families living close to centres far more likely to enroll their children, a pattern consistent with accessibility research across rural service delivery contexts.

Trust in Anganwadi workers proved to be another pivotal facilitator. Mothers described relationships with these frontline workers built over years of interaction through antenatal care visits, immunization drives, and supplementary nutrition distribution, interactions that accumulated into social capital that could be leveraged for preschool enrollment. The workers themselves, embedded in village life and accountable to Child Development Project Officers, served as trusted intermediaries who could reassure hesitant families. This trust infrastructure, the study suggests, is a form of pedagogical support that operates alongside formal curriculum and infrastructure, and strengthening it can amplify the positive shift the researchers observed.

Parents also recognized the role of Anganwadi Centres in inculcating empathy, cooperation, and discipline, underscoring their contribution to holistic child development beyond academics. This value-based framing of early learning challenges the narrow academic metrics that dominate private preschool marketing and suggests that rural families evaluate early childhood services through a multidimensional lens. The study’s authors argue that positioning Anganwadi Centres as inclusive, community-driven institutions aligns with the National Education Policy 2020’s emphasis on equitable, play-based early childhood education, and that strengthening infrastructure, pedagogical support, and social trust can consolidate this emerging consensus.

The implications ripple outward from Madurai to the national stage. As India pursues the National Education Policy 2020 goals, the study offers a technical roadmap for policymakers: the same behavioural model that explained utilization barriers can guide intervention design, targeting predisposing factors through community dialogue on class identity, enabling factors through infrastructure investment and worker training, and need-based factors through parent education on child development milestones. The evolving perspective in rural communities, where Anganwadi Centres are increasingly viewed not merely as welfare centres but as nurturing, value-based spaces for holistic early learning, represents a rare window of opportunity for public early childhood education in India.

For a scheme that reaches millions of children through a sprawling network of village-level centres, the Madurai findings suggest that the future of public preschool in India may depend less on expanding coverage and more on transforming perception. The counternarrative of educated parents choosing Anganwadi preschools for their child-centered pedagogy offers proof that these spaces can compete on quality rather than merely on accessibility. If this revaluation spreads, India’s cornerstone early childhood programme could achieve the equitable, play-based learning environment that the National Education Policy 2020 envisions, one village and one trusting relationship at a time.

Subject of Research: Perceptions, barriers and facilitators of ICDS preschool enrollment among mothers in rural Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India

Article Title: Perceptions, barriers and facilitators of ICDS preschool enrollment among mothers in rural Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India

Article References: Maheswaran, M., Sree, S., Palanisamy, B., & Sivakumar, S. P. (2026). Perceptions, barriers and facilitators of ICDS preschool enrollment among mothers in rural Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07554-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07554-3

Keywords: Perceptions, barriers, facilitators, ICDS, preschool, enrollment, mothers, rural, Madurai, Tamil, Nadu, India

The scientific rationale behind the supplement rests on two well-characterized neurochemical pathways. Griffonia simplicifolia seeds are exceptionally rich in 5-hydroxytryptophan, a direct metabolic precursor of serotonin, the neurotransmitter most closely associated with mood regulation and the modulation of the brain’s so-called fear circuit centered on the amygdala. Lactium, by contrast, is an industrial hydrolysate of alpha-s1-casein, a milk protein that contains the bioactive peptide alpha-casozepine, a compound that acts on the GABAergic system, the brain’s primary inhibitory neurotransmitter network and the same target engaged by classical benzodiazepines. By combining a serotonergic precursor with a GABA-modulating peptide, the supplement theoretically engages both of the major neurotransmitter systems implicated in anxiety neurobiology, offering a dual mechanism of action that mirrors the logic of conventional pharmacotherapy without the same risk profile.

The clinical picture that brought these children to the researchers’ attention is characteristic of preschool psychopathology, which rarely presents as the verbalized worry seen in older children and adults. Instead, anxiety in very young children frequently manifests as intense emotional and behavioral dysregulation, including screaming, crying, tantrums, and aggression directed at themselves or others. In this sample, 68 percent of the children exhibited symptoms consistent with emotional dysregulation, and the vast majority carried comorbid neurodevelopmental diagnoses, with 86 percent meeting criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and 45 percent for autism spectrum disorder. This level of comorbidity reflects the reality of tertiary care clinical practice, where complex, overlapping symptom presentations are the norm rather than the exception, and it makes the task of isolating treatment effects on anxiety specifically all the more challenging.

The study design was longitudinal, interventional, and single-center, with participants enrolled between May 2022 and January 2025. Twenty-five children initially met inclusion criteria and provided informed consent, though three dropped out very early, leaving 22 in the final analysis. The daily dosage consisted of 75 milligrams of Griffonia extract, providing 15 milligrams of 5-hydroxytryptophan, alongside 150 milligrams of hydrolyzed milk protein. Eight children received the supplement for three months under the initial protocol, while fourteen were enrolled under a revised protocol extending supplementation to six months. Exclusion criteria included an intelligence quotient below 70, lactose intolerance, and concurrent pharmacological treatment, ensuring that any observed effects could not be attributed to other medications.

Assessment relied on a combination of parent-reported and clinician-rated instruments, a methodological choice the researchers emphasize as a strength given that preschool children may behave differently across relational contexts. Parents completed the Preschool Anxiety Scale, a 28-item questionnaire covering generalized anxiety, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, fears of physical injury, and separation anxiety. Clinicians independently rated global functioning using the Children’s Global Assessment Scale and overall illness severity and improvement using the Clinical Global Impression scale. Statistical analysis employed linear mixed models with random intercepts to account for within-subject correlation over time, and p values were corrected for multiple comparisons using the false discovery rate procedure, a relatively rigorous approach for a study of this size.

The results after three months of supplementation were notable across multiple domains. Parents reported a statistically significant reduction in the total anxiety score, with a standardized effect corresponding to roughly five points on the scale, as well as significant decreases in the social anxiety and fears of physical injury subscales. Clinician-rated global functioning, as measured by the Children’s Global Assessment Scale, increased by approximately 7.7 points, a change that reached a p value below 0.0001 and that the researchers describe as clinically meaningful given the scale’s range from 1 to 100. Perhaps most strikingly, these improvements were maintained at a follow-up assessment conducted three months after the supplement was discontinued, suggesting that the benefits persisted beyond the period of active supplementation rather than simply reflecting a temporary pharmacological effect.

When the researchers compared children who received the supplement for six months with those who received it for only three, the between-group differences on the parent-reported anxiety measures did not reach statistical significance. However, on the clinician-rated improvement scale assessed three months after discontinuation, the six-month group showed significantly better outcomes, with mean improvement scores indicating greater sustained benefit. This finding, while requiring confirmation in larger samples, hints at a dose-duration relationship in which longer exposure to the supplement’s active compounds may consolidate clinical gains more durably. The researchers also noted that girls maintained improvements in overall functioning to a significantly greater extent than boys at the post-discontinuation follow-up, a gender difference that emerged despite the absence of baseline differences in anxiety expression between the sexes.

In an additional exploratory analysis conducted outside the main protocol, the researchers compared the developmental trajectory of the supplemented children with a retrospectively reconstructed trajectory of 15 preschool children with anxiety symptoms who had not received the supplement, recruited from a naturalistic clinical setting between 2021 and 2024. At the end of the respective observation periods, children who had taken the supplement scored significantly higher on the clinician-rated global functioning measure, with an F statistic of 15.15 and a p value of 0.01. The researchers are careful to note that this comparison involved non-contemporaneous, non-randomized groups and should be considered purely exploratory, but it provides a preliminary signal that the supplement may confer advantages beyond what would be expected from natural clinical course alone.

Safety data from the study were reassuring, with no adverse events observed in any participant during the entire observation period. The only known risk associated with excessive intake of the supplement is a mild laxative effect, a profile that stands in stark contrast to the side-effect burden of conventional anxiolytic medications. Six participants did drop out over the course of the study, four due to parental withdrawal of consent, one due to clinical worsening requiring pharmacological treatment, and one due to difficulties with the taste of the supplement, but none of these discontinuations were attributed to safety concerns.

The researchers are unequivocal that these findings should be interpreted as exploratory rather than definitive. The sample was small, the design was open-label and single-arm without a placebo control, the follow-up period was relatively short, and the high rate of psychiatric comorbidity may have contributed to symptom overlap that limits generalizability. Nevertheless, the study represents a meaningful contribution to a field in which fewer than 15 percent of young children with impairing anxiety disorders receive any mental health evaluation or treatment, and in which the developmental stakes are extraordinarily high, given that preschool anxiety predicts persistence into school age and adolescence and interferes with later social and academic functioning. The researchers call for randomized controlled trials with larger samples and longer follow-up periods to confirm whether this combination of a serotonergic plant precursor and a GABA-modulating milk peptide can truly reshape the developmental trajectory of early-onset anxiety, but for now, the results offer a cautious note of optimism for one of pediatric mental health’s most underserved populations.

Subject of Research: A brief research report on the efficacy of Griffonia and Lactium supplementation in a clinical preschool sample with anxiety disorders and emotional dysregulation

Article Title: A brief research report on the efficacy of Griffonia and Lactium supplementation in a clinical preschool sample with anxiety disorders and emotional dysregulation

Article References: Linguanti, P., Troiano, I., Ricci, M., Tolomei, G., Igliozzi, R., Narzisi, A., Masi, G., Sesso, G., & Viglione, V. (2026). A brief research report on the efficacy of Griffonia and Lactium supplementation in a clinical preschool sample with anxiety disorders and emotional dysregulation. Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 5, Article 1905412. https://doi.org/10.3389/frcha.2026.1905412

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frcha.2026.1905412

Keywords: brief, research, report, efficacy, Griffonia, Lactium, supplementation, clinical, preschool, sample, anxiety, disorders

The research team, led by Laura M. Justice of the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy at The Ohio State University, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: do children with language difficulties experience peer talk differently from their classmates? Language difficulties are among the most common neurodevelopmental concerns of early childhood. Late language emergence, marked by delays in vocabulary and word combinations, affects about 13 percent of two-year-olds, while developmental language disorder, a condition impairing language comprehension and production, affects an estimated 7 to 10 percent of four- and five-year-olds. The causes remain unknown, though the condition is highly heritable, pointing to a genetic etiology.

Why does peer talk matter so much? Decades of developmental science show that adverse peer relations in childhood predict internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, conduct difficulties, and risk behaviors extending into adolescence and adulthood. For young children specifically, exposure to talk from others provides the linguistic stimuli that shape the neural pathways supporting language ability. Research in inclusive preschool classrooms has even shown that language growth over an academic year accelerates for children with language difficulties when they interact frequently with peers who have advanced language skills, a phenomenon known as the peer effect. If children with language difficulties are talking less with peers, they may be missing a critical developmental engine.

Previous work had already hinted at trouble. A study of 56 inclusive preschool classrooms using teacher reports found that children with language difficulties had significantly fewer ties in the classroom social network and were substantially more likely to be isolated from their peers. But teacher ratings and brief observations carry well-known biases. The new study took a different route: objective, continuous measurement using the Interaction Detection in Early Academic Settings, or IDEAS, sensing system, which combines voice recorders with Bluetooth proximity beacons worn by teachers and children throughout the school day.

The technology is technically sophisticated. Each participant wore a pouch or vest housing a voice recorder and a location-tracking beacon, with an accelerometer triggering data capture once the wearer was moving around the classroom. Wall-mounted antennae communicated with the beacons via radio frequency signals, classifying participants as being in proximity when they were within 1.5 meters of one another and oriented within 45 degrees. A MATLAB-based pipeline then applied automatic speech recognition to the audio, counting the words exchanged between people who were simultaneously in proximity. A support vector machine filtered out idle periods, and all interaction measures were standardized to words per minute of wear time. Validation work shows the word counts correlate with ground truth at r = .99 for teacher talk and r = .93 for child talk.

The study spanned 29 preschool classrooms in two mid-western states, followed across two consecutive academic years, with up to eight daylong observations per classroom between December and June. Of 181 children in the analytic sample, 36, or 20 percent, were identified as having language difficulties using multiple criteria: a standard score at or below 81 on the expressive communication subscale of the Preschool Language Scale Fifth Edition, an Individualized Education Program, and/or teacher-reported concern about language development. The researchers deliberately avoided relying solely on IEP status, since many children with language needs are never formally identified during the preschool years.

The headline finding is stark. Across all children, peer talk dwarfed teacher talk: children received an average of 31.33 words per minute from peers but only 6.75 from teachers, and produced 21.93 words per minute to peers versus just 2.55 to teachers, effects so large they correspond to standardized differences of 1.61 and 2.23 respectively. Against this backdrop, children with language difficulties received 3.66 fewer peer words per minute and produced 2.50 fewer peer words per minute than their classmates, differences that were statistically significant in multilevel models accounting for observations nested within children and classrooms. Scaled up, the researchers calculate, that gap amounts to about 7,200 fewer words from peers per week, or roughly 260,000 words across an academic year.

Just as striking was what the study did not find. Verbal interactions with teachers occurred at nearly identical rates for children with and without language difficulties, with no significant differences in either incoming or outgoing teacher talk. This surprised the team, given prior evidence that teachers interact more frequently with children with disabilities in inclusive settings. The authors suggest the null result may reflect the more objective and sustained nature of sensing-based observation compared with earlier methods, or the broader, less clinically defined way language difficulties were identified in this sample. Either way, the finding underscores that the distinctive experience of these children lies squarely in the peer domain, not the adult one.

Why do children with language difficulties talk less with peers? The study cannot establish causes, but the authors offer two leading interpretations. The first is homophily, the well-documented tendency of children to prefer playmates who share characteristics such as gender, age, or skill level. Recent research across 28 preschool classrooms found that children receiving special education were 11 percent more likely to play with other special-education children than with those outside that designation. Since children with language difficulties made up only 20 percent of each classroom, such preferences would sharply restrict the pool of available conversational partners. The second interpretation involves pragmatic language, the social use of language. Skills such as taking conversational turns, entering ongoing play, asking questions, and resolving conflicts verbally are often underdeveloped in children with language difficulties, and weak pragmatics has been specifically linked to social exclusion in preschool settings.

The developmental stakes are considerable, though the authors are careful about directionality. Less incoming peer talk could deprive children of linguistic input that fuels vocabulary and grammar growth, compounding their initial difficulties in a feedback loop. Less outgoing talk could further marginalize them from classroom social networks, with downstream consequences for behavior and learning that peer-rejection research has documented for decades. Alternatively, the authors note, the consequences could be neutral or even positive in some respects, and determining which is the case requires future classroom-based research. The study also has limits the authors acknowledge: 29 classrooms limit generalizability, the language-difficulty group may not map neatly onto clinical diagnoses, and the sensors capture frequency but not quality, missing gestures, facial expressions, perspective-taking, and real-time repair of communication breakdowns. Out-of-classroom settings such as playgrounds, where social networks may form differently, were also not observed. Still, the findings mark a technical milestone, demonstrating that wearable sensing can quantify, with unprecedented granularity, the everyday verbal lives of young children, and they signal an urgent need for interventions, such as peer-mediated approaches, that promote peer-to-peer talk for the children who need it most.

Subject of Research: Peer verbal interactions of preschool children with language difficulties measured with wearable sensing technology

Article Title: Peer Talk in the Preschool Classroom: Are the Experiences of Children With Language Difficulties Distinctive?

Article References: Justice, L. M., Pelfrey, G. L., Jiang, H., Foster, T. J., Irwin, D., & Villasanti, H. G. (2026). Peer Talk in the Preschool Classroom: Are the Experiences of Children With Language Difficulties Distinctive?. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07436-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07436-8

Keywords: developmental language disorder, preschool, peer interactions, peer talk, wearable sensors, early childhood education, language development, social exclusion, pragmatic language, teacher-child interaction, inclusive classrooms, child development

The children at the heart of the study were five years old, living in a mixed-population city in Israel where different ethnolinguistic communities meet daily in classrooms, playgrounds, and streets. All six spoke Arabic or Russian as their first language and were learning Hebrew as a second language, both inside the preschool classroom and beyond it. That setting is scientifically valuable because it is not a laboratory simulation of multilingualism; it is the real, sometimes messy, everyday environment in which millions of children worldwide grow up. Schwartz used purposive sampling to select children who could articulate their experiences, and she treated them not as passive subjects but as agents—people with their own theories, preferences, and strategies for navigating multiple languages.

The methodological choice that distinguishes the study is its use of playful art activities as an ecologically valid research tool. Traditional research on language learning beliefs typically relies on questionnaires or interviews, instruments that presuppose verbal fluency and metalinguistic vocabulary that five-year-olds simply do not have. Drawing and play, by contrast, sit squarely within children’s existing communicative repertoire. When a child paints a picture of her classroom and explains who speaks what to whom, she is externalizing a mental map of her linguistic environment. The researcher then engaged the children in conversation around these artifacts, allowing their perceptions to emerge in a register natural to them. This approach aligns with a growing movement in early childhood research that insists children’s voices be heard on their own terms rather than filtered exclusively through adult proxies such as teachers and parents.

Analysis of the material followed a theory-drawn thematic approach, a qualitative method in which themes are identified in the data but interpreted through established theoretical lenses—in this case, frameworks on metacognition, language socialization, and child agency. The analysis surfaced six interlocking themes: children’s awareness of the multilingual environment; their attitudes toward different languages and their language preferences; their motives for learning a new language; issues in their language socialization; and two clusters of metacognitive beliefs—what children believed about themselves as language learners, and what they believed about others as learners and about how a second language should be taught. Together these themes sketch a portrait of children who are not merely absorbing language but actively reasoning about it.

The metacognitive findings are arguably the most striking. Metacognition—the capacity to think about one’s own thinking—was long assumed to emerge later in childhood, but research since Flavell’s foundational work in 1979 has pushed its origins earlier and earlier. Schwartz’s data show five-year-olds holding beliefs about their own efficacy as learners, echoing the self-efficacy theory developed by Albert Bandura: children expressed confidence or doubt about their ability to master Hebrew, and those beliefs plausibly shape how persistently they engage with the new language. Even more remarkably, the children articulated ideas about pedagogy. They had notions about how a second language should be taught and about the role of more proficient peers—what the literature calls language experts, children further along in second-language competence who can serve as models and informal teachers for their classmates.

That peer dimension connects the study to a rich tradition of research on language socialization, the process by which children learn not just linguistic forms but the social rules governing who speaks what, when, and to whom. In a multilingual preschool, those rules are contested and negotiated daily. The children in the study were aware of asymmetries: some classmates knew Hebrew and others did not, and this awareness fed into their social strategies. Previous work by Schwartz and colleagues documented children’s metalinguistic talk in bilingual preschool classrooms—moments when children explicitly comment on who knows which language and why. The new study extends that line by showing how such awareness is woven into children’s self-concepts and their motives for learning. Learning Hebrew, for some children, was not an abstract academic goal but a social one: a ticket into playgroups, friendships, and full participation in classroom life.

The study’s emphasis on agency reframes how we should think about young second-language learners. In the ecological perspective Schwartz has developed across her recent work, language learning is not a one-way transmission from teacher to child but an interaction among parents, teachers, peers, and the children themselves, each exercising agency in different ways. The preschoolers in this study deployed what the author describes as diverse cognitive and social strategies in their second-language learning—repetition, imitation, recruiting help from proficient peers, and strategically choosing which language to use in which situation. Their perceptions, the study concludes, reflect their here-and-now experiences in a multilingual environment, amid a complex meeting of different ethnolinguistic communities. In other words, children’s language beliefs are not free-floating; they are grounded in the specific social geography of their city, classroom, and family.

The findings also carry practical weight for early childhood educators. A substantial body of research, including systematic reviews of teacher–child interactions with multilingual young children, shows that teachers often struggle to respond to linguistic diversity in the classroom. If educators understand that five-year-olds already hold metacognitive beliefs about language learning—beliefs about their own abilities, about their peers’ roles, and about what good teaching looks like—they can design classrooms that build on those beliefs rather than ignoring them. Play-based pedagogy, already widely endorsed in early childhood education, gains an additional justification here: play is not only a vehicle for learning but a medium through which children reveal and refine their understanding of language itself. Art activities, imaginary play, and peer talk become diagnostic and developmental tools at once.

There are, of course, limits to what a small qualitative study can claim. Six children in one Israeli city cannot represent all multilingual preschoolers, and the mini-ethnographic design prioritizes depth over breadth. The author acknowledges the interpretive challenges inherent in representing children’s voices, a concern long raised in the childhood studies literature about authenticity and critical reflexivity. Yet the value of such work lies precisely in its granularity: it documents mechanisms—how a child reasons about a peer’s language expertise, how a drawing encodes linguistic hierarchies—that large-scale surveys could never capture. It also demonstrates a replicable method for other researchers seeking to include young children’s perspectives in studies of language and education.

The broader takeaway is a challenge to common intuition. Adults often imagine young second-language learners as sponges—passive, effortless, untroubled by doubt or strategy. Schwartz’s preschoolers tell a different story. They weigh languages against each other, form preferences, set social goals, assess their own progress, and theorize about instruction. They are, in the fullest sense, agents in their own language learning, navigating a multilingual environment that they perceive with surprising clarity. For researchers, the study adds a method—play and art as windows into children’s linguistic minds. For teachers and parents, it delivers a humbling message: the five-year-old struggling with Hebrew in the corner of the classroom is not just acquiring vocabulary. She is running her own ongoing experiment on what language is, who speaks it, and how she might come to speak it too.

Subject of Research: Preschool children's perceptions and metacognitive beliefs about learning a second language in a multilingual environment

Article Title: Children’s Perceptions of Early Experiences With a Multilingual Environment and Language Learning

Article References: Schwartz, M. (2026). Children’s Perceptions of Early Experiences With a Multilingual Environment and Language Learning. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02342-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02342-1

Keywords: multilingualism, second language acquisition, early childhood education, metacognition, child agency, language socialization, preschool, play-based research, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, language learning beliefs

The research team, led by Gül Yılmaz with Salih Çepni serving as supervisor, took a deliberately two-pronged approach. The study used what methodologists call an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design: first, quantitative measurements were taken to determine whether the intervention changed children’s problem-solving skills at all; then, semi-structured interviews with the children, their parents, and the classroom teacher were conducted to explain how and why those changes occurred. This combination matters because a test score alone cannot capture whether a child who solves a puzzle faster is also more persistent, more curious, or more willing to collaborate—qualities that parents and teachers observe daily and that standardized instruments often miss.

The intervention took place in a public preschool, where nineteen children formed the experimental group and sixteen children served as the control group. Over eight weeks, the experimental group engaged in play-based STEM activities designed to embed engineering-style design challenges and scientific exploration into ordinary play. The control group followed the standard preschool curriculum. To measure outcomes, the researchers used the Problem-Solving in Science Education Scale, a validated instrument that assesses how children approach and resolve problems across different domains, including problems involving the use of materials and problems related to science and nature. Comparing the two groups before and after the intervention allowed the team to isolate the effect of the play-based STEM program from normal developmental progress.

The quantitative results were striking. Children in the experimental group showed statistically significant improvements in problem-solving abilities compared with their peers. The effect sizes—a statistical measure of how large a difference is, not merely whether it exists—were large for material usage problems and for total scale scores, and medium-to-large for science and nature problems. In practical terms, effect sizes of this magnitude indicate that the changes were not marginal statistical artifacts but substantial shifts in how children approached challenges. For a relatively short intervention of eight weeks, delivered to children still learning to sit still for a story, the magnitude of the gains is notable and suggests that early childhood may be a particularly responsive window for cultivating problem-solving skills.

The qualitative strand of the study painted a picture that numbers alone could not. When researchers interviewed the children themselves, they found that the young participants genuinely enjoyed design-based activities—the open-ended challenges that ask a child to imagine a solution, build it, watch it fail or succeed, and try again. Perhaps more telling, the children demonstrated persistence when facing challenges, returning to difficult tasks rather than abandoning them. This willingness to struggle is a hallmark of what developmental psychologists call executive function and what educators often describe as grit, and its emergence in preschoolers through play is consistent with theoretical work by scholars such as Alison Gopnik, who has argued that young children’s play resembles the hypothesis-testing of working scientists.

One of the most intriguing findings was what happened at home. The interviews revealed that children transferred their learning beyond the preschool walls, applying problem-solving strategies and engineering-style thinking to situations in their home environments. Transfer of learning—taking a skill acquired in one context and deploying it in another—is notoriously difficult to achieve in education, and its appearance in four- and five-year-olds suggests that play-based STEM activities tap into something fundamental about how young children encode and generalize knowledge. Parents, for their part, reported enhancements across cognitive, social-emotional, and motor domains, indicating that the developmental ripple effects of the program extended well beyond the problem-solving skills the researchers set out to measure.

The classroom teacher’s observations reinforced this holistic picture. According to the study, the teacher highlighted increased curiosity, creativity, and teamwork among the children participating in the STEM play activities. These outcomes align with a long tradition in developmental theory. Jean Piaget’s constructivist account of cognitive development holds that children build knowledge through active manipulation of their environment, while Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory emphasizes that learning is fundamentally social, scaffolded by interactions with more capable peers and adults. Play-based STEM education, in this light, is not a novelty but a natural synthesis: it places children in socially rich, hands-on environments where cognitive challenge and joyful exploration coincide.

The study was not without its difficulties, and the researchers were candid about them. Implementation challenges included time constraints—the perennial obstacle for preschool teachers juggling multiple curricular demands—initial difficulties with teamwork, as children unaccustomed to collaborative design had to learn to share materials and negotiate ideas, and the limited sustained attention that is simply developmentally normal for young children. These hurdles are important for curriculum designers to understand, because they suggest that successful play-based STEM programs require not just well-designed activities but also realistic scheduling, explicit support for collaboration skills, and activities calibrated to short attention spans. The findings echo earlier research noting that early childhood educators often report low confidence in teaching STEM subjects, making professional support a critical ingredient.

The broader context gives the findings added urgency. Around the world, policymakers have identified early STEM education as a strategic priority, and organizations such as the Joan Ganz Cooney Center have argued in influential reports that STEM learning must begin in early childhood rather than waiting for middle or high school. In Türkiye, where the study was conducted, the Ministry of National Education’s updated preschool curriculum has incorporated STEM content, and industry groups have called for expanded STEM capacity. Yet questions have persisted about whether formal STEM instruction is developmentally appropriate for preschoolers, or whether it risks imposing school-like structure on children who learn best through play. This study’s answer is that the dichotomy is false: when STEM is delivered through play, it amplifies rather than supplants the developmental work of early childhood.

The implications reach teachers, parents, and curriculum designers alike. For educators, the study offers evidence that guided play with clear STEM goals—what researchers have called guided play, where curricular objectives meet playful pedagogy—can yield measurable cognitive gains. For parents, the finding that children carried their problem-solving home suggests that everyday moments of building and tinkering with a caregiver may reinforce classroom learning. And for curriculum designers, the results argue for embedding engineering design challenges into early childhood programs while building in time for collaboration and attention-friendly pacing. As the authors conclude, play-based STEM education holds real potential to promote holistic development in the earliest years—a stage when, as decades of developmental science have shown, the brain is most malleable and the appetite for exploration is at its peak. The study received no external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests.

Subject of Research: Effects of play-based STEM education on problem-solving skills and development in preschool children

Article Title: Play-Based STEM Education in Early Childhood: A Mixed-Methods Study on Problem-Solving and Developmental Outcomes

Article References: Yılmaz, G., & Çepni, S. (2026). Play-Based STEM Education in Early Childhood: A Mixed-Methods Study on Problem-Solving and Developmental Outcomes. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02362-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02362-x

Keywords: STEM education, early childhood, play-based learning, problem-solving skills, preschool, mixed methods, child development, engineering design, guided play, curriculum design, social-emotional development, educational research

The study’s methodological approach is deliberately comparative. Rather than surveying one group of adults about what readiness means, the researchers adopted a qualitative embedded single-case design and gathered semi-structured interviews with twenty-one participants spanning the full arc of the transition to primary school. The sample included eight primary school teachers, six preschool teachers, and seven parents. This three-way structure matters because most existing research has relied on single stakeholder perspectives, which the authors identify as a significant gap in the literature. By placing the accounts of the people who teach five-year-olds, the people who teach four-year-olds, and the people who raise them side by side, the study could map exactly where their constructions of readiness converge and, more revealingly, where they diverge.

The interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis, a systematic method for coding textual data into categories and themes. The researchers grounded their work in an ecological tradition that traces back to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development, which holds that child development cannot be understood apart from the nested systems of family, school, and culture that surround it. That theoretical commitment shows in the results. Readiness, in this study, is not a list of attributes but a network of relationships, and the same network looks different depending on where an observer stands within it.

One of the study’s clearest findings is that school readiness extends well beyond the early literacy and numeracy skills that dominate popular anxiety about starting school. Across all three stakeholder groups, participants described a multidimensional construct encompassing language and communication skills, self-regulation, motor development, and social-emotional adaptation. This aligns with a substantial body of prior research. Longitudinal work has shown that early attention and social skills predict later academic achievement, sometimes as strongly as early math and reading scores, and studies of preschool social-emotional learning have repeatedly linked emotional competence to early school success. The Turkish study adds texture to that consensus by showing that even when stakeholders agree on the broad dimensions of readiness, they weigh them very differently.

Those differences follow the logic of each group’s pedagogical role and observational context. Primary school teachers, who must manage a classroom of twenty or more children the moment school begins, emphasized classroom functionality. For them, readiness is whatever allows the daily machinery of instruction to run: a child who can sit, follow routines, listen, and participate without constant individual intervention. Preschool teachers, observing children in a play-based and developmentally oriented environment, focused on developmental precursors, the underlying capacities in self-regulation, language, and motor coordination that make classroom functioning possible later. Parents, meanwhile, prioritized observable academic indicators and motivation, the things they can see at home: a child who recognizes letters, counts, and seems eager to learn. Each perspective is internally coherent, yet none captures the whole picture alone.

This divergence is not merely a curiosity of perception research. It has practical consequences for how transition programs are designed and evaluated. If parents believe readiness means knowing the alphabet while teachers believe it means being able to wait one’s turn, then a family preparing a child at home may be optimizing for the wrong target, not through negligence but through a rational reading of what they can observe. Prior comparative studies in Singapore, Australia, and the United States have documented similar mismatches between parental and teacher priorities, and research on family-school connectivity during the transition to primary school suggests that communication gaps between home and school are a persistent feature of this developmental juncture. The new study reframes these mismatches not as errors to be corrected but as structural features of a multi-actor system that must be actively coordinated.

The relational framing also carries a pointed implication for accountability. If readiness is a capacity that emerges from interactions among children, families, and schools, then responsibility for a successful transition cannot rest on the child or the family alone. This echoes the influential ecological model of the kindergarten transition developed by researchers including Robert Pianta and Sara Rimm-Kaufman, who argued decades ago that the transition to school is shaped by the social ecology of classrooms, families, and children together. It also resonates with the concept of readiness as a relational construct advanced by Australian researchers Sue Dockett and Bob Perry, whose work on transition programs has shaped policy across the Asia-Pacific region. What the Turkish study adds is a fine-grained, interview-based account of how that relationality is actually constructed in the language of the people involved.

The study’s context gives its findings additional weight. Turkey has been rapidly expanding preschool enrollment, with national education statistics showing continued growth in early childhood provision, and the country’s Ministry of National Education has updated its preschool curriculum in recent years. In systems undergoing that kind of expansion, the alignment between preschool pedagogy, primary school expectations, and parental understanding becomes a live policy problem. A preschool sector that emphasizes play and holistic development feeding into a primary sector that emphasizes formal instruction creates precisely the discontinuity that transition research warns against. The authors’ finding that preschool teachers speak in terms of developmental precursors while primary teachers speak in terms of classroom functionality is, in effect, a description of that discontinuity rendered in the vocabulary of the educators themselves.

Methodologically, the study is candid about its scope. Twenty-one interviews in a single case cannot establish how widespread these patterns are, and the authors do not claim statistical generalizability. What qualitative designs of this kind offer instead is analytical depth: a documented account of how meaning is constructed, with enough detail for readers to judge its relevance to other contexts. The researchers followed established guidance on saturation in qualitative sampling and reported their analysis procedures transparently, and the work received ethics approval from Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University with informed consent from all participants. The interview data themselves are not publicly available, owing to the confidentiality of information about identifiable teachers, parents, and children, though the authors note the data are available upon reasonable request.

The conceptual payoff is the study’s central reframing: school readiness as a multi-actor, context-dependent transition capacity rather than a fixed developmental threshold. In practical terms, that means the question worth asking is no longer simply whether a child is ready for school, but whether the relationships surrounding that child, between home and classroom, between preschool and primary school, between what parents can see and what teachers need, are configured to carry the child across the transition. The authors suggest this relational and ecological perspective offers a more accurate account of how readiness is constructed across educational contexts than any single-informant checklist can provide. For a field long dominated by assessment instruments and readiness screenings, the message is quietly radical: readiness is not something a child has, but something a community does, and the adults who disagree about its definition may be the very people who need to start talking to each other.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder perspectives on school readiness during the transition from preschool to primary school

Article Title: School Readiness as a Relational Transition Capacity: A Comparative Study of Stakeholder Perspectives Across Educational Levels

Article References: Demirtaş, E. N., & Taneri, A. (2026). School Readiness as a Relational Transition Capacity: A Comparative Study of Stakeholder Perspectives Across Educational Levels. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02361-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02361-y

Keywords: school readiness, school transition, early childhood education, preschool, primary school, parental involvement, family-school relationships, self-regulation, social-emotional development, qualitative research, stakeholder perspectives, developmental psychology

The study, conducted by researchers at Michigan State University including Kang Gao, Chandani Bhandari, Tianxiang Zhang, Sarah N. Douglas, and Subir Biswas, focused on a single target child in an inclusive preschool classroom who had been identified by his head teacher as facing both behavioral challenges and English language learner (ELL) status. The child, given the pseudonym Doruk, was a four-year-nine-month-old White male who spoke Turkish at home and used conversational English at school. His teacher reported that he engaged with peers in aggressive ways, such as hitting and biting, and that classmates had begun avoiding him as a result. Despite concerns shared with the family, no special education services were pursued, and Doruk carried no formal diagnosis related to his behavior.

The stakes of such early social difficulties are considerable. The authors note that nearly 22 percent of young children in the United States speak a language other than English at home, with 15 percent of kindergarten children identified as English language learners, while behavioral challenges affect approximately 14 percent of children in early childhood. Prior research has shown that children with behavioral challenges tend to engage in fewer peer interactions, are often excluded from peer play, experience more peer conflicts, have fewer friends, and more frequently play alone. For children who are ELL, peer interactions are often short-lived, and a lack of English proficiency can itself produce challenging behaviors when peers fail to understand a child’s messages—sometimes leading to special education referrals or exclusionary discipline.

The theoretical grounding for the work draws on complementary frameworks. Social engagement theory holds that active participation in social settings benefits both the child and peers, while a lack of engagement is associated with poorer mental health and behavioral difficulties. Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory emphasizes that peer interaction is crucial for cognitive and language development, and Bandura’s social learning theory highlights how children learn by observing and imitating their social environment—processes that can be hampered when language barriers exist. Together, these perspectives suggest that children with behavioral and language challenges may need additional, well-timed teacher support to build sustainable social engagement in preschool settings.

Measuring that engagement, however, has long been a practical bottleneck. Continuous observation is time-consuming, can introduce bias, and reduces the direct teaching time teachers have available. When teachers lack dedicated observation time, they may rely on memory, which the researchers note can be inaccurate. The study therefore employed the Wearable Human Interaction Tracker, or WHIT, a sensor system built around Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radio-based location tracking, integrating localization hardware from Eliko Systems within a custom wearable package. UWB localization was chosen because its performance has been validated in prior research and industrial applications.

The technical architecture of WHIT is elegantly simple in concept. Participants carry tag sensors that transmit UWB blink messages received by wall-mounted anchor sensors; using signal timing, the system performs triangulation to determine each child’s precise real-time location, forwarding computed positions to wall-mounted receiver sensors. Each sensor is the size of a standard credit card, weighs 12 grams, and carries a rechargeable battery lasting seven hours per charge. The electronics are sealed in plastic packaging for safety and secured with snaps into pockets of custom-made t-shirts to prevent removal. Doruk wore two sensors, one in each sleeve pocket, to detect the directionality of his movements, while his five participating peers wore a single front-pocket sensor each.

Proximity served as the indicator of social engagement. A threshold of one meter was chosen empirically based on prior studies: proximity within one meter maintained for at least 15 seconds was coded as social engagement, ending only when the distance exceeded one meter for 10 seconds or more—an approach that accommodated natural movement while preserving measurement accuracy. Calibration preceded data collection, and at least two research assistants independently logged each child’s location and behaviors every minute from an observation booth to validate the sensor data. Agreement between observational and sensor data reached 93.73 percent, with most disagreements occurring during transitions between classroom locations or near zone boundaries. Data were collected across six observation days over two months in late Fall 2024, during both structured teacher-led activities and unstructured free play, with sessions averaging 80 minutes.

The results painted a nuanced and somewhat surprising portrait of Doruk’s social world. His overall social connectivity was 45.1 percent, actually higher than the average of his peers, yet his average connectivity duration was shorter at 48.5 seconds compared with the peer average of 54.4 seconds. His connectivity with any individual peer never exceeded 19 percent, and he showed a preference for one peer, Otto, over the other four. The most striking finding emerged when activity type was considered: during structured, teacher-guided activities, Doruk’s social connectivity soared to 91.6 percent, exceeding every peer, while during unstructured free play it fell to 33.7 percent—the largest structured-versus-unstructured gap of any child in the study.

Initiation and termination data added another layer of insight. Doruk’s initiation rate was 53.1 percent, slightly above the peer average, and his initiation-to-termination ratio of 1.09 exceeded the classroom average of 0.97. In practical terms, Doruk frequently started social interactions, but it was usually his peers who ended them—a pattern the authors interpret as a less stable social engagement style, with limited peer interest in sustaining interactions. A spatial heatmap of his movements revealed a strong preference for the area between the kitchen and the center table, along with time spent at the craft and sensory tables, and comparatively little time in the book nook, animals, and blocks areas.

For the researchers, these findings carry clear implications for practice. The data suggest that Doruk may have a strong need for structure in his social interactions, and that teacher guidance allows him to engage more appropriately—while also indicating he may need support learning to sustain peer engagement and build stronger individual relationships. Teachers could use initiation and termination data to design interventions promoting meaningful peer interaction, scaffold social engagement activities strategically, and leverage area preferences when planning targeted activities. More broadly, the study demonstrated that individual differences in social connectivity, peer preference, and engagement patterns are common even among children without identified challenges—differences that continuous observation alone would rarely detect. The authors acknowledge limitations, including the single-classroom exploratory design, the inability to separate the effects of ELL status from behavioral challenges, and the asymmetric sensor configuration, and they call for larger samples and two-sensor configurations for all participants. With further development, they conclude, wearable sensor systems like WHIT could provide the objective, real-time data teachers need to complement their own observations and inform targeted interventions in inclusive preschool classrooms.

Subject of Research: Wearable sensor-based measurement of social engagement patterns in preschool children with behavioral challenges and English language learner status

Article Title: Sensor Technology to Measure Social Engagement for Children with Behavioral Challenges

Article References: Gao, K., Bhandari, C., Zhang, T., Douglas, S. N., & Biswas, S. (2026). Sensor Technology to Measure Social Engagement for Children with Behavioral Challenges. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02353-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02353-y

Keywords: wearable sensors, social engagement, preschool, behavioral challenges, English language learners, ultra-wideband localization, inclusive classrooms, early childhood education, peer interaction, child development, WHIT sensor system, teacher intervention

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: Seker, P. T., & Savas, O. (2026). Preschool children develop scientific inquiry skills through STEM based investigations. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 898. 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