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The purpose of this paper is to report on how early years practitioners worked with the ORIM Framework to support work with parents to promote early literacy experiences.

Co-produced Knowledge Exchange (KE) was used to develop and evaluate work with parents to facilitate their young children’s literacy. Information was gathered in discussion groups, interviews with parents and practitioners and feedback from all the parties involved.

Practitioners and families engaged with each other in the further development of an established literacy programme, and families demonstrated “ownership” of the co-produced knowledge after the end of the project.

Project design in co-produced research and KE is necessarily flexible. The focus is on practitioners’ knowledge and ownership of the process, sharing knowledge with parents and enhancing children’s experiences.

Practices that can enhance parental engagement in their children’s early literacy are varied and multiple and ORIM can be used flexibly to plan, develop and evaluate innovative and community – (and family –) specific practices.

Where parents have more knowledge of children’s early literacy development they are in a better position to support them; for learning communities there are implications in terms of future development of work with families to support early literacy development.

This paper contributes an original approach to the co-production of research with early years practitioners. It also identifies specific issues around the ethics of ownership in co-produced research.

This paper discusses early childhood classrooms as powerful spaces for identity work and, more specifically, as a place (or not) for supporting early STEM identity development. It makes the case for educators and researchers alike to promote an expanded role of early childhood STEM education in the daily lives of young children.

This paper uses a qualitative interpretive methodology, drawing from a wide array of research and theoretical literature from early childhood and STEM education and developmental psychology, as well as public policy.

Today, both research and interventions aimed at fixing the “leaking STEM pipeline” and theory/research on STEM identity development focus on children in middle school and above. Yet, children's attitudes about STEM and about themselves as STEM learners are formed early, and identity work is a task of early childhood. This suggests a need to focus on young children's engagement with STEM education as a means of nurturing their early STEM identity development.

This paper synthesizes previous research to outline the need for expanding STEM education in early public schooling. It proposes a conceptualization of early STEM academic identity development (based on the premise that middle school is too late to fix the leaking STEM pipeline).

Professional development (PD) is an essential component of continuing learning for in-service teachers. This paper discusses a school-based example of using the best practice of coaching in early childhood education supported by a professional development school partnership. We explain how a teacher identified need led to a collaborative, multistep approach to meeting that need in connection to State mandates.

In this research, we used a case study methodological approach with a team of preschool teachers at one school. The model combines use of PD sessions, classroom coaching, classroom observation and reflection.

Teachers’ feedback indicates that using the strategy positively impacted most of the participants’ ability to support communication, community-building and inclusive practices in their classrooms. The data that emerged in the following year evidenced increased use of visual supports in classrooms, use in connection with literacy goals and interest in creating new uses in the school.

This article contributes an action-oriented school-based example of bridging research to practice to support teachers’ needs through PD and coaching in a PDS. The design and practical implications may interest preschool educators, instructional coaches, administrators, professional development schools and others involved with monitoring teacher development initiatives.

This paper discusses the implementation of integrated science, technology, engineering and mathematics (EC-iSTEM) education with children in birth-to-age 5 classrooms. It offers a conceptualization for EC-iSTEM, as well as a developmental trajectory in the form of the iSTEM Rope Model. It further highlights the intersection of EC-iSTEM education and the Reggio Emelia-Inspired Approach (RE-IA) as a lens for both viewing EC-iSTEM implementation with young children and as an area of needed research.

This paper uses a qualitative interpretive methodology, drawing from a wide array of theoretical and research literature on early childhood education and integrated STEM education.

Despite growing research and policy reports that advocate for the inclusion of integrated STEM education in early childhood classrooms, today there is currently imprecision in understanding what exactly “integrated STEM” means when applied to the instruction of very young children. This suggests a need for the creation of a unifying conceptual framework, as well as finding alignment with currently known pedagogical approaches to ground the work of birth-to-age 5 teachers and researchers.

This paper proposes a new conceptualization of integrated STEM education for use in birth to age 5 classrooms, as well as a systhsis of the current literature to assess the pedagogical linkages between EC-iSTEM and RE-IA. As the proposed conceptualization offered in this paper is new and research in this area is nascent, further empirical investigation is warrented.

This paper proposes a new conceptualization of integrated STEM education for use in the early childhood education field. It further synthesizes the current literature to assess the pedagogical linkages between EC-iSTEM and RE-IA, suggesting practice implications for supporting the knowledge and skill development of young children from birth to age 5.

This paper aims to focus on how reading for pleasure is transmitted within the family. Using data taken from the Programme for International Student Assessment test of 2009, which dealt in depth with the reading proficiency of students, the authors show that children of parents who read for pleasure are better readers. Within the extensive research and published results on reading performance, the authors focused on the transmission of parents’ reading attitudes to their children.

In this study, the authors have opted for an approach of “difference in differences”, applied to a population that represents all 15-year-olds from five countries (Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Italy and Portugal). To support this study, the authors chose as a response variable the difference between reading performance and maths performance of each student, taking into account five plausible values for each student. The authors have several explanatory variables, among them what we call the “treatment”, which is the parents’ enthusiasm for reading.

The calculated estimations clearly indicate that there is a positive effect for four out of the five countries analysed, ranging from 4 points for Italy to 6.5 points for Germany and Portugal. As for the significance of the effect, with the exception of Hungary, the result is reliable and robust. It should also be noted that the variable that indicates the existence of a reading habit by children (daily reading for pleasure) is seen as a factor that positively affects the difference between competence in reading and mathematics in four out of the five countries analysed.

The results show positive effects on children whose parents read for pleasure, and this fact should be used to further encourage parents to promote their own reading time for pleasure. In view of the already quantified trend in international reports that adults are reading less, it seems crucial to involve educational authorities in reversing this phenomenon, knowing the impact that adult reading habits have on the reading competence of young people.