Search results

This review study focuses on the framework for pre-primary education and language acquisition for non-Chinese-speaking students (NCS students) from ethnic minority families (EM families) in Hong Kong.

This paper adopts a multidisciplinary perspective that involves both assessing the broader governing framework and researching their specific needs. In its overview of the significant changes made in recent years and an exploration of the gaps in the framework, with reference to other jurisdictions, along with input from developmental psychology as it relates to the issues faced by NCS students.

This study contributes to the literature on how to shape further policies and reforms to optimize learning of NCS children in Hong Kong from a young age. This helps NCS students and families achieve their right to education and equal opportunities and schools to cater the needs of these students and families, which is essential to providing an enriched learning environment for our children regardless of their ethnicity.

This study uses multidisciplinary approach to study pre-primary education and Chinese language acquisition of ethnic minority students in Hong Kong.

The aim of this study is to make students understand the significance of strategy formulation and the impact of internal and external factors on the strategy adopted by the firm. Upon the completion of this case study, the students will be able to achieve the following: • map out relevant macro-environment strategical factors of an organization; • assessing organizations industry and competitive environment; • outline strategic group maps to assess positions of key competitors; • develop issues priority matrices; • testing competitive power of resources; and • identifying an organizations internal strengths and external threats.

Across the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic left few organizations untouched and many entrepreneurs fighting to stay afloat. Here we look at the survival dilemma faced by the founder of Little Birds Kindergarten, in Doha, Qatar. Founded by a local Qatari businesswoman, the kindergarten offered a British-style curriculum and an Early Years Foundation Stage structure; with her profound passion for technology, the founder (here called Fatma) has always believed that integrating technology into a child’s early learning opens the door to limitless opportunities and potential. Therefore, she ensured that the kindergarten consistently invested in advanced educational technology and the accompanying software. Yet, while the reputation of Little Birds Kindergarten stayed high, the COVID-19 pandemic stunted the growth in enrolments. Fatma stopped paying herself a salary and even drew on her own savings to keep the kindergarten going but it still did not earn enough to compensate for her initial investment. So, despite her passionate concern for the kindergarten, she worried about being unable to keep it afloat for much longer. The purpose of this case study is to shed light on the strategic posture, performance and market position of one kindergarten. From there, it surveys the opportunities in the education industry that are unique to student enrolment and highlights what a kindergarten can do to develop a survival strategy.

The case is suitable for teaching basic and advanced courses at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

Current approaches to early childhood teacher education have moved from a view of student–teacher training as interactions involving one novice and one expert, to a process that demands resources and engagement of several professional players while mediating students’ learning in practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a triadic mentoring model of a university–school collaboration (“Academia–Classroom”) on student teachers’ (STs) learning in the context of early childhood education in Israel. Eight mentoring triads were formed in six kindergartens. Each mentoring triad was comprised of the ST, a cooperating teacher and the college supervisor. This paper focuses on three representative triads of the eight that were studied.

The in-depth study adopted qualitative methodology including three complementary data-collection sources: observations of the STs working with children in the kindergarten; observations and recordings of the triadic mentoring conversations following the observations; in-depth interviews with each participant in the mentoring triad. Data were analyzed using an interpretative framework developed for the study, which combined elements from Engestrom’s cultural historical activity theory, Gee’s building tasks and Edward’s relational agency.

The research identified three major patterns of interaction operating in the mentoring triad that promoted or hindered the learning process of early childhood education students: dissonant, harmonic and argumentative. The way in which relational agency developed in the triads was found to be the most significant aspect of students’ learning process.

The patterns of interaction identified shed light on new aspects of relational agency, thus offering additional interpretative lenses for examining how relational agency operates in ST mentored learning processes. These new identified patterns have practical implications for the design of mentoring frameworks in early childhood teacher education.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how kindergarten, as a learning arena equal to a university college, creates learning spaces that engage or intervene in the professional learning of student teachers in early childhood education.

This paper is based on narratives from students in work-based education.

The paper addresses the complexity of education by outlining how the concept of learning is applied in earlier research on work-based learning (WBL).

This earlier understanding is complemented this with two theoretical lenses (sociocultural and sociomaterial thinking) to analyse a constructed narrative from the students.

The two theoretical positions open up to examine knowledge development and potentially enrich the picture of learning spaces in experiential WBL, going beyond the student as an individual learner.

This study aims to examine the perceptions of undergraduate students studying early childhood education who took an academic course in which transformative pedagogy is adopted as part of a holistic approach designed to create transformative change and strengthen the students’ self-efficacy for sustainability, and thus, help reduce the environmental crisis in which we live.

By means of a phenomenological approach, this exploratory qualitative research used three research tools, reflection analysis, drawing analysis and analysis of course summary work, to identify changes in the perceptions of students undertaking the course. Data analysis was based on an inductive approach and included first- and second-cycle coding.

The results of the study show that the transformative pedagogy adopted in the course created transformative change in the students’ knowledge, attitudes, emotions and self-efficacy to act to reduce the climate crisis, not just through recycling.

The study was conducted with a relatively small, single class of undergraduate early childhood education students. The impact of certain activities may be different in larger classes. The gender imbalance, with the majority of students being female adds a further limitation. Male students may have different perspectives than female students, and those with different backgrounds and interests may respond differently.

This study provides some important insights into how sustainability education can be applied in a higher education curriculum. The study also contributes to the current dialogue on sustainability education by providing a rich description of how students experience alternative approaches to teaching in the field.

This study demonstrates how environmental action can be integrated in higher education.

The current paper examines the relationships between watching television for various times of day and reading achievement for a subsample of third grade language minority (LM) students compared to third grade students in general.

The analysis uses ECLS-K 1998–99 data to first test for significant differences between the two samples, then further explores these relationships using separate OLS multiple regression models, while controlling for past reading achievements and socioeconomic variation.

Building on more nuanced versions of displacement theory, this paper finds a positive relationship between reading achievement and watching television after dinner on weekdays specifically for LM students. For the general sample, watching TV on weekends or weekdays at any time period has no relationship with reading achievement.

This research suggests the potential for TV or perhaps other media to act as a lingual- or cultural-learning facilitator for LM students, being positively tied to reading achievement. The paper’s unique focus on multimedia use and LM students makes it particularly applicable to educators and public policy officials tasked with confronting the reading skills gap for a growing LM student population.

Many students with learning disabilities (LD) experience significant difficulties in developing writing proficiency. Early identification and intervention can prevent long-term writing problems. Early identification and intervention require reliable and valid writing assessments that can be used to identify students at risk and monitor their progress in response to intervention. One promising approach to assessing students' performance and progress in writing is Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM). In this chapter, we provide an overview of CBM. Next, we describe a theoretical framework for writing development, and discuss implications of this framework for developing writing assessments. We then describe current efforts to develop a seamless and flexible approach to monitoring student progress in writing in the early elementary grades, and highlight important directions for future research. We end with a discussion of how teachers might eventually use CBM to make data-based decisions to provide effective individualized interventions for students who experience writing difficulties.

The primary purpose of this chapter is to synthesize the existing research that describes children who are unresponsive to generally effective early literacy interventions. Studies were selected in which: (a) children ranged from preschoolers to third graders and were at-risk for reading disabilities; (b) treatments targeted early literacy; (c) outcomes reflected reading development; and (d) students’ unresponsiveness to intervention was described. The search yielded 23 studies, eight of which were designed primarily to identify characteristics of unresponsive students; the remaining 15 studies focused on treatment effectiveness, but also identified and described unresponsive students. A majority of unresponsive students had phonological awareness deficits; additional characteristics included phonological retrieval or encoding deficits, low verbal ability, behavior problems, and developmental delays. Methodological issues are discussed that complicate comparisons of non-responders across studies. A secondary purpose of this chapter is to describe findings from recent longitudinal studies that support the hypothesis that non-responders may be the truly reading disabled. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine an experimental neo-Herbartian and Frobelian curriculum Work in the kindergarten: An Australian programme based on the life and customs of the Australian Black published by Martha Simpson in 1909.

The paper uses both primary and secondary sources to understand the context of production and reception of the settler narratives advocated for use in the curriculum. Simpson's curriculum and other primary literary texts provide case study examples.

The research found that colonial and imperial literary texts provided a departure point for learning activities, enabling the positive construction of white Australian identity and the supplantation of Aboriginal people in a post-federation kindergarten setting.

By considering the role of imperial and colonial narratives in post-federation experimental curriculum, this paper offers insight into the role such narratives played in the formation of Australian national identity.

Young children write to learn the alphabetic code, take notes to help them remember, and provide meaningful text to others. These are cognitively and linguistically complex processes. Reciprocal relationships among the development of writing, the purposes of writing, and the learners of interest impact instructional approaches and student outcomes. Teachers can increase success when they provide explicit and systematic self-regulation and writing instruction, view children as collaborators in the process, provide scaffolding that gradually shifts the responsibility to the children, and adapt instruction to meet the abilities and interests of the children. Effective instructional practices for young children with disabilities or who are at risk, are presented, for example, scaffolded writing, the use of graphic organizers, and self-regulated strategy development.