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The provision of nutritious food to children in full day care pre‐schools is essential to ensure adequate child growth and development. The purpose of this paper is to outline the development of a nutrition assessment tool (scored evaluation form (SEF)) for this setting, and describe the nutrition practice findings measured by this tool in full day child care in Ireland.

This study involved two phases: first, a comprehensive literature review carried out on each criterion in the SEF to ensure best practice; and second, use of the SEF in full day care pre‐schools to assess their nutrition practice.

Use of the SEF demonstrated that portion sizes provided to infants and toddlers were inadequate. Poor provision of iron containing, vegetable and dairy foods was noted, as were poor meal time practices. The phrasing of certain criteria needs modification to avoid misinterpretation of portion size.

With small modifications to clarify the portion size provided, the SEF can be used in the pre‐school setting to ascertain nutrition practice.

The SEF requires testing to determine its utility as an intervention tool whereby its use may lead to positive changes in nutrition practice in the pre‐school setting.

This paper outlines the development of a nutrition practice assessment tool for the full day child care setting in Ireland and describes previously unknown data gathered using this tool.

When comparing pre-school teachers with university lecturers, society generally acknowledges the latter as a highly skilled professional, while the former does not achieve such admiration or financial reward. Upon studying this status quo, the authors introduce ethically resilient teaching as a set of seven + one common qualities that are shared by both levels of educators. The purpose of this paper is to present these qualities, describing how they relate to the function of teaching and learning with the aim of bridging the perceived gap between these two levels of educators.

Over several years, the authors observed patterns in the ideas and comments surrounding ethically resilient teaching that have arisen in teacher training sessions in both the pre-school and university domains. Through these reflexive communal conversational training sessions, attributes that are commonly associated with ethics and resilience in teaching and learning were identified. These attributes were then clustered into seven groups or qualities which represent the authors (and their participants’) compilation of ethically resilient teachers.

Ethically resilient teachers are not specific to a single educational level with there being considerable overlap in the qualities that describe ethically resilient teaching in both the pre-school and university levels.

The study considers two educational contexts: pre-schooling and tertiary education only. The outcomes arise from an urbanised South African multicultural context.

The qualities (seven + one) that describe ethically resilient teachers may be used as predictors for ethical resilience in teaching in both the pre-school and university levels.

There are many ethical teachers who leave the vocation as they are not resilient. There are many resilient teachers who would not be labelled as ethical. It is proposed that ethics should be a qualifier to the term resilience in terms of teaching and learning for highly effective sustainable pedagogy.

The topic of ethically resilient teaching has not been found in the literature. The authors have proposed that an ethically resilient teacher is one who for various reasons, has found a strategy for continuing in a self-fulfilling vocation as a teacher in which his or her students achieve their goals in a sustainable manner. These teachers are steadfast, hardy and committed, even in the face of turbulence and are deeply concerned with their students’ results and experiences within the classroom.

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have challenging behaviours that can create significant teaching challenges in group settings such as in mainstream pre-school inclusive settings. This study aims to identify and understand, from the perspectives of mainstream pre-school teachers in Singapore, the type of common challenging behaviours observed in pre-schoolers (mean age = 4.5 years, SD = 1.1, range = 3-6) with ASD.

Participants consisted of 62 teachers (mean age = 35.8 years; SD = 10.8) teaching in mainstream pre-school centres located in Singapore completed an open-ended survey. Twelve codes were generated and served as guidelines for coding the qualitative data. Codes with similar themes were then grouped to form four construct categories: social communication, restricted and repetitive behaviours, attention and learning and others.

Results indicated that difficulty with change/transition and social/peer interaction were the most concerning issues across all settings, whereas “lesson time” and “circle time” were the two most common activities/settings in which the concerns were reported by teachers.

Findings from this paper may add to the limited research looking at the challenging behaviours exhibited by children with ASD in mainstream pre-school settings in Singapore. Understanding the type of challenging behaviours presented in pre-schoolers with ASD and the activities/settings in which these behaviours occur may help the teachers to link the difficulties to specific interventions to further support their inclusion in a mainstream pre-school setting.

The purpose of this paper is to determine if there is value in performing studies comparing a cybernetic approach over a traditional teaching approach in regards to improved pre-school tuition.

A two independent groups design was implemented with each group receiving a different treatment. The first group had their lesson presented in the traditional teaching approach while the second group were part of a cybernetic approach. After each group had their lesson, each child was assessed and asked a series of ten questions. The total correct answers for the traditional group was compared to the total correct answers of the cybernetic group. The results were statistically examined using a t-test and Pearson r correlation.

The group who took part in the cybernetic lesson had a 46 per cent increase in the total number of correct answers. The cybernetic approach to the pre-school lesson was an improvement in terms of memory retention. This initial study justifies a series of further experimental designs.

This study provides a basis for further studies of comparative educational approaches to pre-school education and learner memory performance. A cybernetic approach to pre-school instruction has a lot to offer and is especially beneficial for children who are learning language, whether first or second language. This is a model to develop further, for use in the teaching-learning environment.

The use of Teachback within a pre-school context may have additional benefits such as improved language acquisition through additional practice of verbal expression. A practical method of addressing the challenge of cybernetics training was also presented in this study.

When the Teachback is performed, the person creates a verbal expression based on their language and background. As the Teachback occurs in a social context amongst peers, an opportunity for an exploration into the diverse backgrounds of the individual pre-school children can take place, especially beneficial when in a multi-cultural setting.

There are few cybernetics studies conducted on pre-school aged children. This is the first study whereby cybernetic tools such as Teachback have been used in pre-school education.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors contributing to the competencies and capabilities of Family Development Center (FDC) staff in order to promote pre-school language developmental support amongst parents.

A cross-sectional study was conducted amongst 260 FDC staff under the supervision of Thai local authorities in the rural province of Suphanburi in Thailand from July to September 2016. Self-administered questionnaires were used. Eligible participants with at least a year’s experience on the FDC committee were purposively selected. Analyses were performed by descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation, Spearman’s correlation, χ² test and stepwise multiple regression.

Only 23.5 percent of staff had a high level of capability. The respondents’ perceptions of their self-capability were influenced by motivation, attitudes toward promoting language learning amongst parents, self-efficacy, sufficient budget and receiving constructive appraisal support (r=0.387, 0.328, 0.366, 0.106 and 0.104, respectively). Marital status was negatively associated with FDC staff capability (r=−0.172). The multivariate analysis showed that 23.9 percent of the variability of FDC staff’s self-capability could be explained by their motivation for working, attitude, self-efficacy and marital status (p<0.001).

Research findings could be used to improve motivation for working, positive attitudes and self-efficacy regarding parenting promotion for pre-school language development to achieve standardized quality performance. Results of this study could also form the basis for designing effective training programs for FDC staff in the context of the specific organization and community.

The purpose of this paper is to describe pre‐school children's learning during a learning study, and their teachers’ awareness of each child's learning possibilities in relation to what they actually learned. The paper's aims are twofold; first, to focus on how to design learning study in pre‐school settings; and second, to study young children's (aged 4‐5) learning.

The data consist of three videotaped interviews with each participating child (n=39), three videotaped interventions and one videotaped interview each with three pre‐school teachers.

The results show: an increased learning outcome in all three groups; there is a discrepancy between what the children actually learned and the teachers’ awareness about the children's possibilities. The teachers’ awareness of the children's learning possibilities differ from what the children actually learned.

Learning study is usually used in school settings, but this paper shows its potential also in pre‐school settings. Beside this, the results indicate that there is a risk that if teachers’ expectations are too high or too low, they will affect children's abilities to learn in either a positive or a negative way by not offering the children sufficiently challenging tasks. By the use of learning study the teachers became aware of this discrepancy and were able to reassess their expectations for each child according to their abilities.

The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of problem‐solving tasks on mentoring received, peer mentoring and mentoring provided.

This cross‐sectional survey was based on a questionnaire that was sent to a total of 435 employees from 29 pre‐schools in Norway. A total of 284 responses were returned, a response rate of 65.3 per cent. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to assess the validity and reliability of measurement scales. Research questions were formulated. Stepwise regression analysis was recommended to assess the magnitude and direction of the independent variable on the three dependent variables, when controlled for by demographic and career variables.

The results revealed that problem‐solving tasks have a positive and significant influence on mentoring received, peer mentoring and mentoring provided. This means that performing unfamiliar tasks increases the occurrence of the three mentoring roles.

The independent variables only explained 14 per cent, 30 per cent and 38 per cent of mentoring received, peer‐mentoring and mentoring provided, respectively. Thus, other job characteristics, for example specialization, need further investigation to uncover the influence of job characteristics on mentoring.

Problem‐solving tasks will be a challenge for educational leadership to coordinate the mentoring roles according to the changing nature of work in pre‐schools.

There is no previous research that investigates how job characteristics in general and problem‐solving tasks in particular influence the occurrence of mentoring relationships.

Several ideas exist about social justice and how inequalities can be tackled to help families and children in poverty. The Coalition government released the UK’s first Child Poverty Strategy in 2011. Pervaded by neoliberal ideology, the strategy mentions “empowering” pre-school services and practitioners within the childcare market “to do more for the most disadvantaged” (Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Department for Education (DfE) 2011, p. 35). The purpose of this paper is to bring to light how Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) practitioners across England have engaged with policy discussions and adopted expectations concerning their place in addressing child poverty.

Using a phenomenological qualitative research design the paper draws upon 30 interviews with pre-school practitioners in three geographic areas of England. All interviewees worked with families and children in poverty and were senior ECEC practitioners within their pre-school settings.

Many interviewees shared the Coalition’s construction of child poverty as a problem of “troubled” parenting. These views pervaded their interaction with parents and intersected with the regulatory influence of “policy technologies” to influence their practice within a context of austerity cuts. This limited practitioners’ poverty sensitivity and their promotion of social justice. Therefore this paper concludes by critiquing the contribution which ECEC practitioners can make to addressing child poverty.

The findings suggest there may be a need for poverty proofing toolkits in the pre-school sector.

This paper provides a rare insight into how pre-school practitioners have engaged with, adopted and adapted assumptions about their role within policy discussion over child poverty and the promotion of social justice.

Socially disadvantaged parents often concentrate on providing for their children instead of stimulating them to learn because of their own low self‐efficacy as learning agents. This study describes the development and pilot evaluation of a programme designed to empower new immigrant parents in Hong Kong to assume active, systematic and confident roles to teach their pre‐school children learning skills. A needs assessment was conducted to guide the development of the programme, which was also informed by research evidence and community engagement. A pilot trial was conducted and qualitative data were obtained from the participating parents. Parents reported improvements in their children's motivation to learn and the parent‐child relationship. The research provided information on programme design, delivery and implementation strategies. It suggested important entry points to engage and empower parents to provide timely stimulation to their young children.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the factors influencing young children’s (aged three to five years) understanding of brand symbolism.

Multiple hierarchical regression was used to analyse the relationships between age, gender and environmental factors, including family and the media, on the development of brand symbolism in pre-school children based on 56 children and parent dyad interviews.

Results confirmed the primary influence of age, television exposure and parental communication style on three to five-year-old children’s understanding of brand symbolism. The study demonstrates that the tendency to infer symbolic user attributes and non-product-related associations with brands starts as early as two years, and increases with age throughout the pre-school years. Children exposed to more television and less critical parental consumer socialisation strategies are more likely to prefer branded products, believe that brands are better quality and that they make people happy and popular.

Identifying the factors that influence the development of symbolic brand associations in pre-school children provides an important contribution to public policy discussions on the impact of marketing to young children.

The paper extends existing research by considering, for the first time, the role of environmental factors in pre-schooler’s understanding of brand symbolism. The results provide a more informed basis for discussion about the impact of marketing messages on very young children and the environmental factors that may lead to a more critical engagement with brands.