The study, published open access in the Early Childhood Education Journal, draws on the Conceptual PlayWorlds (CPW) framework proposed by Marilyn Fleer, an intervention model rooted in Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory of play, imagination and creativity. In a CPW, teachers and children together enter an imaginary story world driven by a dramatic problem. A fairytale is introduced, an imaginary space is collectively created where objects take on new meanings, and both children and adults move in and out of that space as they investigate scientific phenomena. Crucially, the model does not ask teachers to abandon their expertise in play; instead it positions them as play partners in role and, simultaneously, as agentic science learners who resurface their own conceptual knowledge through the activity. As the research team notes, the model is deliberately adaptable: it is not the teachers who must adjust to the model, but the model that adjusts to the teachers.

That adaptability was the engine of the study. The programme, part of a 24-month state-funded research project coordinated by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation, began with whole-group sessions introducing theoretical principles and examples of play-based science. It then shifted to small-group sessions held in situ at each of the six kindergartens, where researchers collaborated with teachers on designing their own CPW activities. Classroom implementation followed over a one-month window, with sessions lasting between one and four hours, and the programme closed with individual post-interviews, focus group discussions and post-session questionnaires. Methodologically, the team followed Hedegaard’s educational experiment tradition, treating both the process and the outcome as equally important, and analysed the rich video and textual record through qualitative content analysis, with independent coders reaching a 90 percent agreement rate.

The findings revealed striking diversity in how teachers responded to the challenge. One group, dubbed the Prep Squad by the researchers, described acute insecurity about their science knowledge; the two teachers in this kindergarten rehearsed their torch-and-shadows activity privately before trying it with children, with one admitting that her greatest fear was saying something scientifically incorrect. Here, the researchers provided extended content support, sharing research findings on children’s misconceptions about light and shadow, proposing implementation examples, and offering psychological encouragement by discussing their own past experiences as kindergarten teachers. At the opposite end of the spectrum stood the Engineering Enthusiasts, teachers already confident in science and STEM who wanted to design construction activities. For them, the researchers deliberately stepped back, gave space for brainstorming, and engaged in deeper epistemological discussion about what engineering is and how it connects to science.

Other cases exposed different idiosyncrasies. The Awareness Collective comprised experienced, proactive teachers who questioned the programme’s structure, preferred flexible scheduling, and were galvanised when gender equity entered the discussion; they shared classroom examples of gendered behaviour and worked with researchers on disrupting stereotypical images of scientists through play. In the Teacher Mentor Circle, a dominant kindergarten administrator exercised agency over scheduling and discussion, an early-career teacher on a temporary contract remained peripheral, and the researchers deepened the theoretical treatment of play via Vygotsky, connected the topic to recent local wildfires to make the science tangible, and suggested using the school’s outdoor space as part of the imaginary world. The Balance Board group, with eight participants spanning veteran and mid-career teachers, revealed a generational divide in openness to the innovation, widespread anxiety about science concepts, and practical worries about crowded classes, cameras and consent forms.

The sixth group, the Next Gen Teachers, was largely young and academically accomplished, with several holding science-related master’s degrees, yet none had ever implemented play-based science approaches. Their participation in discussions was notably low, likely reflecting group size and the absence of a peer leader, so researchers took a more directive role, helped formulate the science problem, and enriched the content for older kindergarten classes by extending magnetic attraction into magnetic repulsion and suggesting riddles and artefact construction. Across all six cases, researchers also acted as brokers, carrying ideas between groups, such as the suggestion from one kindergarten to rewrite the fairytale with children based on their own inferences, mirroring the iterative engineering design cycle.

Synthesis across the cases produced a set of guiding principles for what the authors call adaptive professional development. Support included resourcing teachers’ science content knowledge through literature, curriculum connections and implementation examples; facilitating the delicate balance between play and science learning goals; deepening pedagogical theory while promoting inclusivity and equity; contextualising activities in each kindergarten’s infrastructure and real-world contingencies; fostering collaboration within and across groups; assisting with research practices such as data collection and communicating ethics to hesitant parents; and even taking on roles inside the CPW when teachers requested it. Critically, none of this followed a preset, authoritative script. Support emerged responsively, in the moment, allowing teachers to develop agency while remaining backed by expert collaborators working within a democratic, non-hierarchical partnership.

The implications ripple outward. The study confirms what earlier research has long documented: preschool teachers consistently report low confidence in science, and they teach science less frequently than language arts, a gap tied to both content knowledge and pedagogical approach. Yet it also demonstrates that when play-based science methods are introduced with personalised, in-situ support, teachers not only adopt them but celebrate them by the end of the programme. The researchers suggest policymakers should design professional development as adaptive rather than one-size-fits-all, and teacher educators should anticipate contextual obstacles such as large class sizes, limited space and heavy schedules, which the Greek teams navigated through rotating groups and parallel researcher support. The study also extends theory, showing that stories need not be pre-selected for their scientific content; choosing a fairytale first and then identifying the science within it widens the possibilities of storytelling-based teaching.

The authors are candid about limitations, including researcher influence that varied somewhat across groups, the possibility of socially desirable responses shaped by group norms, and the situated Greek context, whose transferability awaits future study. Still, the central message is resonant and practical: teachers with diverse backgrounds, preferences and needs can successfully design play-based science instruction when the professional development around them bends to fit them, rather than the reverse. In an era when early STEM engagement is increasingly linked to later achievement and equity, and when policy reports from Europe to Australia champion play-based learning, this Greek experiment offers a concrete, testable blueprint: meet teachers in their own classrooms, listen to their fears and passions, and let the science emerge through the story everyone builds together.

Subject of Research: Adaptive professional development for play-based preschool science teaching using the Conceptual PlayWorlds model

Article Title: Teaching Science Through Play: An Adaptive Professional Development Programme to Provide Tailored Support to Preschool Teachers

Article References: Nipyrakis, A., Stavropoulou, E., Zachariadi, I., Kakana, D., Christidou, V., & Fragkiadaki, G. (2026). Teaching Science Through Play: An Adaptive Professional Development Programme to Provide Tailored Support to Preschool Teachers. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02336-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02336-z

Keywords: Conceptual PlayWorlds, professional development, preschool teachers, early childhood education, play-based learning, science education, STEM, Greece, teacher support, Vygotsky, qualitative research, kindergarten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02322-5

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

The research, led by Ifeoma Cecil Okechukwu-Uzoechi of the STADIO School of Education in Durban, South Africa, together with colleagues at Rajamangala University of Technology Krungthep in Bangkok, set out to address a persistent weakness in teacher preparation. Conventional programs transmit valuable skills, from curriculum planning to classroom management, but often leave graduates stranded between educational theory and the messy realities of the classroom. Reflection is routinely prescribed as the remedy, yet it is frequently left unstructured, producing what the authors describe as superficial rather than transformative understanding. Their aim was to give reflection an explicit architecture, and an emotional foundation to match.

The theoretical scaffolding rests on three pillars. Donald Schön’s classic model of the reflective practitioner distinguishes reflection-in-action, the on-the-fly adjustment of judgment during teaching, from reflection-on-action, the more deliberate analysis that follows. Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory contributes the insight that reflection is not a solitary act but a socially mediated one, deepened by dialogue and by the Zone of Proximal Development, the space between what learners can do alone and what they can achieve with support. Ron Ritchhart’s Visible Thinking Approach supplies the operational bridge: structured routines such as See-Think-Wonder, I Used to Think… Now I Think, Compass Points, Step Inside, Claim-Support-Question and Think-Puzzle-Explore, which externalize cognitive processes and make them available for inspection and discussion. Contemplative practice, in turn, was expected to supply the inner conditions, calm, self-awareness, and emotional regulation, that allow such routines to do their work.

The study took the form of a qualitative case study conducted at a teachers’ training college in South Africa between January and March 2025. From an initial pool of twenty-six final-year pre-service teachers aged twenty-two to thirty, twelve participants, eight women and four men, met the inclusion criteria of informed consent, full attendance at VTA sessions, and completion of pre- and post-practicum reflection activities. Each VTA routine ran as a structured, instructor-led activity of roughly thirty to forty minutes embedded in weekly seminars. Crucially, before each routine, participants spent three to five minutes on a brief mindfulness exercise such as breath awareness, performed in small groups, followed by whole-class debriefs.

Data came from three triangulated sources: individual semi-structured interviews of about forty-five minutes with each participant, two focus group discussions of roughly an hour each, and bi-weekly reflective journals responding to structured prompts. Thematic analysis, following Braun and Clarke’s iterative procedure, produced a hierarchical coding tree that reached both code and meaning saturation after about two-thirds of the corpus had been analyzed, with the remaining data confirming rather than extending the emerging patterns. Rigor was reinforced through member checking, peer debriefing, reflexive journaling by the research team, and an audit trail, while ethical clearance came from the KwaZulu-Natal Research Ethics Committee under reference HSS/1915/0166 M.

Four interlocking themes emerged. The first, metacognitive growth, was the most pervasive. Participants repeatedly described how See-Think-Wonder disrupted habitual, often deficit-oriented readings of learners. One participant, identified as Ms. N, wrote that when she first saw a photograph of a noisy class she immediately judged the students as disrespectful, but the routine revealed how quickly she jumped to conclusions, and she now forces herself to list only what she actually sees before interpreting. Another participant said the routine slowed down his teacher brain, replacing blame with the question of what else could be happening. The journaling routine I Used to Think… Now I Think prompted some participants to revise entrenched beliefs about discipline and classroom control, although not everyone transformed dramatically; one participant still held that discipline must come first, yet conceded the routine opened a door to trying something different.

The second theme concerned emotional and professional identity. Participants reported that short breathing exercises reduced anxiety before presentations and created small moments of calm that helped them articulate their thinking. Contemplative pauses appeared to ground them, making the cognitive routines feel less mechanical and more personal. Yet identity development proved nonlinear and sometimes uncomfortable. Several participants confessed persistent imposter feelings, with one writing that despite learning a great deal, she still did not feel teacher enough when comparing herself to others. The authors interpret this through identity frameworks that see teaching identities as negotiated between internal self-perception and external expectation, with contemplative practice creating the space for that negotiation and VTA routines providing the language for it.

The third theme, social-constructivist learning, highlighted the Vygotskian heart of the intervention. Working through the routines in groups generated a shared professional vocabulary, with terms like evidence, interpretation and wonderings entering everyday conversation. Disagreement, initially experienced as irritating, turned out to be pedagogically productive: participants reported that having to justify their interpretations to skeptical peers pushed them into their collective zone of proximal development, converting polite consensus into genuine critical thought. One participant noted that although she felt annoyed when her idea was brushed off, she later realized the friction had helped her think more rigorously. The routines thus functioned as cultural tools mediating social learning, exactly as Vygotsky’s framework would predict.

The fourth theme, contemplative integration, captured how mindfulness reshaped engagement with the thinking routines themselves. Some participants initially found the practices strange, with one admitting it felt odd to close her eyes in a teacher education class. Within two to three weeks, however, attitudes shifted, and participants reported that the mindfulness breaks slowed them down and allowed more honest engagement with what they were observing. The authors caution that this receptivity was not automatic; novices may experience discomfort or resistance before recognizing the professional value of contemplative practice, echoing recent scholarship noting that such practices require careful scaffolding.

The study’s practical implications are concrete. The authors recommend sequencing VTA routines developmentally, beginning with observational routines like See-Think-Wonder and progressing toward interpretive and critical forms such as Claim-Support-Question, so that reflection deepens in stages. They further suggest embedding brief contemplative practices before and after thinking routines to enhance emotional regulation and openness to perspective-taking, and deliberately designing group-based reflection to normalize cognitive conflict as a learning resource. Teacher education programs adopting the framework are advised to provide professional learning for teacher educators in both visible thinking facilitation and basic contemplative techniques.

The authors are careful about the limits of their claims. The sample was small and self-selected, drawn from a single institution, and participants were not tracked into their early careers, so the findings are context-specific rather than generalizable. Future research, they suggest, could employ larger mixed-methods or longitudinal designs to test whether VTA-plus-contemplative frameworks influence later classroom practice, teacher wellbeing, and ultimately learner outcomes. Nor do they claim the integration transforms teacher education outright. Rather, they argue, it created fruitful conditions in which novice teachers could experiment with new ways of seeing, feeling and making sense of their practice. In an era when education systems face upheaval on multiple fronts, the study makes a case that preparing teachers is as much about cultivating metacognitive insight, emotional presence and social responsibility as it is about technical competence, and that a few minutes of mindful breathing before a structured thinking routine may be one of the simplest, most teachable ways to begin.

Subject of Research: An integrated visible thinking and contemplative learning framework for fostering reflective practice in pre-service teacher education

Article Title: Integrating visible thinking and contemplative learning to foster reflective practice in pre-service teacher education

Article References: Okechukwu-Uzoechi, I. C., Anyanwu, C. C., Rakthin, C., Songsiengchai, S., Vorawattanachai, P., & siripala, W. (2026). Integrating visible thinking and contemplative learning to foster reflective practice in pre-service teacher education. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 902. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02158-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02158-6

Keywords: visible thinking approach, contemplative learning, reflective practice, pre-service teachers, teacher education, mindfulness, metacognition, professional identity, Vygotsky, Schön, Project Zero, qualitative case study