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 problem the researchers set out to address is well documented. Globally, digital technologies have become a core element of primary teacher training, with organizations such as ISTE and UNESCO pushing for classroom technology competence, and with curricula like Australia’s demanding that students develop algorithmic thinking and problem-solving skills embedded in authentic contexts. Yet studies of initial teacher education consistently reveal that programs emphasize technological knowledge while neglecting technological pedagogical knowledge, the crucial understanding of how to teach with and about technology. Without that, pre-service teachers tend to fall back on generic strategies, reproducing commercial step-by-step coding activities without conceptual understanding, or relying on loosely connected, activity-based lessons that look engaging but lack instructional coherence.

The research team, led by Peter Curtis, Michael D. Carey and Natalie McMaster of the University of the Sunshine Coast, together with David A. Martin of Edith Cowan University, points to striking evidence of this gap. In a frequently cited study by Bower and Falkner, when pre-service teachers were asked to list pedagogical strategies for developing students’ computational thinking, most simply equated computational thinking with using technology, and only one explicitly mentioned coding. Even more telling, the candidates reported high confidence in their abilities, a phenomenon the researchers describe as a third order of ignorance: being unaware of one’s own lack of pedagogical knowledge. Systematic reviews of computational thinking in teacher education reach similar conclusions, finding that translating confidence with digital tools into meaningful classroom practice remains a persistent challenge.

The 3C Model, whose three Cs stand for Context, Capabilities and Computational focus, emerged from an earlier qualitative study by Martin, Curtis and Redmond that examined how primary school students learned coding and computational thinking through the framework. That study used a triangulated design combining semi-structured focus-group interviews, analyzed through Clarke and Braun’s thematic analysis with NVivo software, and an insider researcher’s systematic observations and reflective field notes analyzed through Schön’s framework of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. The findings showed that the model enhanced student engagement and supported curriculum learning outcomes, and subsequent work by Wang and Kale highlighted its potential as a developmentally appropriate approach for building foundational computational thinking skills in pre-service teachers.

What distinguishes the 3C Model is its explicit grounding in established learning theory. The framework is anchored in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, specifically targeting children aged around 10 and 11 who sit near the transition from concrete operational to formal operational thinking. At this stage, learners can reason logically about tangible experiences but still rely heavily on concrete, contextualized material to support cognitive processing. The model also builds on the Concrete-Representational-Abstract instructional sequence and the Language Model, both drawn from mathematics pedagogy and rooted in Bruner’s theory of enactive, iconic and symbolic representation. The researchers are candid that TPACK, the influential framework describing the intersection of technological, pedagogical and content knowledge, tells teachers what they need to know but does not prescribe how to sequence instruction. The 3C Model fills that translational gap.

In practice, the model unfolds across a five-lesson sequence. Lesson 1, Context, introduces curriculum content through an authentic, culturally appropriate problem scenario that integrates digital technologies with other learning areas such as science, health or mathematics. Lesson 2, Capabilities, has students explore what a digital tool such as Scratch or a micro:bit can actually do, without writing any code, while the teacher elicits pre-coding language like if-then and repeat until through structured discussion. Lessons 3 and 4, the Computational focus, support a deliberate and gradual shift from student-familiar everyday language to the formal abstraction of coding and algorithmic thinking, with students acting out algorithms physically before translating their pseudocode into block-based programs. Lesson 5 invites students to create a unique artifact through project-based learning, applying their new skills to a problem of personal or community relevance.

Two design choices make the framework particularly notable for equity. First, because individual devices are not central to developing computational thinking in the early lessons, students can engage meaningfully with complex coding concepts in a largely unplugged environment, allowing schools with limited computing resources to participate fully. Second, the delayed introduction of abstract code gives teachers natural opportunities to differentiate instruction, supporting learners who need concrete representations, language support or extra scaffolding. The authors provide worked examples spanning year levels, including an upper primary unit integrating health, English, mathematics and digital technologies using Scratch, and a lower primary beach safety sequence that weaves together the Blue-Bot block-coding app, mathematics and English, alongside a marking rubric and assignment templates hosted in an open science repository for other teacher educators to adopt.

The team also reports preliminary evidence from an exploratory implementation, in which the 3C Model was embedded into coursework as pedagogical learning and assessment tasks at two Australian universities. While the authors are careful to characterize this as an informal investigation rather than a formal research study, pre-service teacher feedback suggested increased confidence and improved instructional skills in teaching coding and computational thinking. The researchers stress, however, that prerequisites matter. Programs should introduce the model only after candidates have studied TPACK and the Concrete-Representational-Abstract approach or Language Model in their technologies and mathematics coursework, since understanding the gradual release of responsibility and the principles underlying those sequences is critical to teaching coding through the model’s structure.

The implications extend beyond individual classrooms. The authors argue that embedding digital competence as a core professional expectation should be supported by incorporating frameworks like the 3C Model into accreditation and curriculum standards, and they connect the work to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 on quality education by framing it as a route to equitable access to high-quality teacher preparation. Future research, they say, should investigate the model at scale, including longitudinal exploration of pre-service teacher confidence, pedagogical shifts and student outcomes. If those studies bear out the early promise, a model that asks children to walk an algorithm before they type one may become a standard fixture of how the next generation of teachers learns to teach the language of computers.

Subject of Research: A pedagogical framework for teaching coding and computational thinking in teacher education

Article Title: Advancing digital technology teacher education through the 3C model

Article References: Advancing digital technology teacher education through the 3C model. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00056-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00056-1

Keywords: teacher education, computational thinking, coding, 3C Model, TPACK, pedagogy, pre-service teachers, digital technologies, Piaget, unplugged learning, curriculum integration, primary school

The study drew on data from a six-year, school-based physical activity initiative conducted in south-eastern Norway. Of 351 children whose parents provided consent, 330 completed at least one valid maximal treadmill test, an unusually rigorous approach in pediatric research where field estimates of fitness are far more common than direct measurement. Because valid peak oxygen uptake data from 2016 were available from only three of the nine participating schools following a technical data loss, the researchers based their inferential analyses on measurements collected in 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, providing a longitudinal window that spans most of primary school.

At the heart of the research lies a methodological question that has divided pediatric exercise scientists for decades: how should oxygen uptake be expressed when comparing children of different sizes? Raw absolute values in liters per minute naturally favor older, heavier children. Dividing by total body mass is the most common correction, but it penalizes children with higher body fat, who contribute mass but little metabolic machinery for running. Allometric scaling, which uses exponentials of body mass, and scaling to fat-free mass, which isolates metabolically active tissue, offer alternatives. The HOPP team, led by Asgeir Mamen of Kristiania University College, together with Julianna Buer of the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and Per Morten Fredriksen of the University of Inland Norway, designated fat-free-mass-scaled peak oxygen uptake as their prespecified primary outcome and tracked all four expressions simultaneously.

The statistical architecture reflected the complexity of the design. Linear mixed models included test year, school allocation group, sex, and the interaction between test year and group as fixed effects, with participant identity as a random intercept and test year as the repeated factor. The primary model incorporated 904 observations from 314 children, a sample that gives the analysis substantial power to detect developmental trends. School-level models were run as sensitivity analyses to probe whether results were being driven by the clustering of children within individual schools, a known hazard of school-based interventions.

The headline result was unambiguous in direction, if nuanced in interpretation. Fat-free-mass-scaled peak oxygen uptake was significantly associated with test year, allocation group, sex, and the test year by group interaction, with all p-values at or below 0.030. From fifth to sixth grade, the adjusted mean fell by 5.73 milliliters per kilogram of fat-free mass per minute in the intervention group and by 5.11 in the control group. Critically, the difference between those group-specific changes was just 0.62 milliliters, with a 95 percent confidence interval spanning from minus 4.25 to 3.00 and a p-value of 0.736. In other words, the school-based physical activity program appeared to make no measurable difference to the final-year decline.

That equivalence between intervention and control schools is perhaps the study’s most sobering finding. The HOPP project was designed as a pedagogical experiment in which schools adopted enhanced physical activity programming, and the reasonable hope was that extra activity would buffer children against fitness losses as they approach adolescence. Instead, the data suggest the late-primary-school decline was resistant to the intervention as delivered. Body-mass-relative and allometrically scaled oxygen uptake also fell significantly in both groups during the final year, while absolute peak oxygen uptake, unadjusted for growth, held roughly steady, hinting that increases in raw aerobic capacity were simply failing to keep pace with children’s rapid physical development.

Sex differences emerged across every expression of fitness, with boys showing higher adjusted values than girls. Yet the magnitude of that gap depended heavily on how the data were scaled. When oxygen uptake was normalized to fat-free mass, which strips away the influence of differences in body composition between the sexes, the sex difference was substantially attenuated. This observation reinforces a growing consensus in pediatric physiology: apparent fitness gaps between boys and girls are partly artifacts of scaling choices and body composition rather than true differences in the oxidative capacity of muscle tissue.

The school-level sensitivity analyses added another layer of nuance. Changes in the three body-size-adjusted expressions of fitness were negative at all nine schools, suggesting the final-year decline was a pervasive phenomenon rather than a quirk of any particular classroom, neighborhood or teaching staff. Such consistency strengthens the biological plausibility of the trend, while also underscoring that whatever combination of growth, maturation and behavior drives the decline, it operates broadly across the study population and overwhelms school-level variation in programming.

The authors are candid about the limitations that temper firm causal conclusions. The study design could not separate growth-related developmental changes from shifts in behavior associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, which overlapped with the later measurement years and is known to have disrupted children’s physical activity worldwide, nor from the possibility that the composition of participants changed over time. A retrospective trial registration, dated 20 June 2015 on ClinicalTrials.gov as NCT02495714, and the 2016 data gap further complicate the inferential picture. Still, the convergence of negative findings across multiple scaling methods and all nine schools makes the late-primary decline difficult to dismiss as statistical noise.

For researchers, the message is methodological: conclusions about childhood aerobic fitness hinge materially on scaling method, body composition and school-level heterogeneity, and studies that report only a single expression of peak oxygen uptake may tell an incomplete or even misleading story. For parents, educators and policymakers, the findings add to mounting evidence that the transition out of primary school is a vulnerable window for children’s cardiovascular health, one that conventional school-based activity interventions, at least as implemented in HOPP, did not shield against. Identifying what does work during those years, and distinguishing genuine developmental biology from modifiable behavior, now stands as an urgent task for pediatric exercise science.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal development of peak oxygen uptake in 6- to 12-year-old children

Article Title: Longitudinal development of oxygen uptake in 6- to 12-year-old children: the Health Oriented Pedagogical Project (HOPP)

Article References: Mamen, A., Buer, J., & Fredriksen, P. M. (2026). Longitudinal development of oxygen uptake in 6- to 12-year-old children: the Health Oriented Pedagogical Project (HOPP). BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07631-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07631-7

Keywords: peak oxygen uptake, aerobic fitness, children, fat-free mass, allometric scaling, treadmill running, primary school, physical activity, longitudinal study, pediatric health, HOPP, Norway