This paper explores how preschools can be purposefully designed to aid cultural learning through guided play practices. In recent literature, there has been a renowned interest in the role of the exogenous environment in psychological processes, including learning. The idea that the design of preschools can meaningfully be seen as cultural niche construction and that guided play practices in these environments can aid the preparation for cultural action is promoted, and a theoretical framework is presented. The empirical data draw from (...) a synthesis from three ethnographic research sites in multilingual communities, and data are used to explore how cultural affordances are used in designed environments as part of guided play practices. The results indicate how niche construction of affordances aid cultural learning and is achieved through both direct guided play interaction between teachers and children and also in the way of the indirect design of environments that is incorporated in children’s peer play. It is discussed what this means for play research as well as for guided play practices that aim to promote cultural learning. (shrink)

Analogical reasoning by comparison is considered a special case of inductive reasoning, which is fundamental to the scientific method. By reasoning analogically, learners can abstract the underlying commonalities of several entities, thereby ignoring single objects’ superficial features. We tested whether different task environments designed to trigger analogical reasoning by comparison would support preschoolers’ induction of the concept of material kind to predict and explain objects’ floating or sinking as a central aspect of scientific reasoning. Specifically, in two experiments, we (...) investigated whether the number of presented objects (one versus two standards), consisting of a specific material and the labeling of objects with the respective material name, would benefit preschoolers’ material-based inferences. For each item set used in both experiments, we asked the children ( N = 59 in Experiment 1, N = 99 in Experiment 2) to predict an object’s floating or sinking by matching it to the standards and to verbally explain their selections. As expected, we found a significant effect for the number of standards in both experiments on the prediction task, suggesting that children successfully induced the relevance of material kind by comparison. However, labels did not increase the effect of the standards. In Experiment 2, we found that the children could transfer their conceptual knowledge on material kind but that transfer performance did not differ among the task environments. Our findings suggest that tasks inviting analogical reasoning by comparison with two standards are useful for promoting young children’s scientific reasoning. (shrink)

Based on Eisenberg et al.'s model of prosocial motivations, the present study examined what motivates preschoolers to display instrumental helping and how various motivations develop during the preschool years. The participants were 477 preschoolers aged 3–5 years assigned to one of five groups. In each experimental group, the experimenter emphasized an altruistic or egoistic helping motivation, namely, empathic concern, moral rules, praise or rewards. In the control group, no helping motivations were emphasized. Their instrumental helping was then measured (...) by sorting cards for a sick child to play a game. The results show that each helping motivation had a positive effect on instrumental helping. Most of the motivational effects were similar across age, but the motivational effect of empathic concern increased obviously at the age of 5 years. Therefore, the present study reveals that both altruistic and egoistic motivations motivate preschoolers to help others. Most of the motivations develop steadily during the preschool years, but empathic concern as an altruistic motivation increases greatly at the end of the preschool years. The present study thus confirms the diversity of preschoolers' helping motivations with Eisenberg et al.'s model of prosocial motivations. (shrink)

This paper sets out to examine the place of theory in preschool education, considering the theories to which practitioners and providers have access and which provide a rationale for everyday practices and shape the experiences of young children. The paper reflects the circumstances of preschool provision, practices and thinking in the UK in general and in Scotland in particular. The central argument is that while there may be little obvious recourse to theorising and limited exposure to explicit theory about children’s (...) development, learning and education, practitioners and those responsible for provision have tacit understandings or implicit theories which can be seen to shape their practices. The paper begins by considering the explicit theory which practitioners are exposed to through the development of practice guidance and professional education. This is followed by an examination of the explicit theories adopted from psychology and more recent theoretical developments which have their roots in other disciplines and perspectives. Some influences on practitioners’ implicit theories are discussed before considering two key aspects of the dominate consensus about good practice: that play is the medium through which children learn and that practice should be child-centred. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ‘identity’ of preschool education theory and the benefits of articulating the implicit theory and folk beliefs on which local practices are based. (shrink)

The aim of the present study, which involved preschool teachers, was to explore the area of working with musically gifted children. In particular, we focused on the identification of musically gifted children and monitoring of their musical development, preschool teachers’ competence for working with children, and evaluation of factors important for the development of musically gifted children. Research results showed that the majority of preschool teachers: were able to identify musically gifted children; rarely monitored and documented children’s musical development systematically (...) and did not acquire enough knowledge for working with musically gifted children during their formal and informal education. Among the important factors influencing the development of musically gifted children, preschool teachers pointed out motivation to work with musically gifted children, identification of musically gifted children, cooperation with music experts and parents, and implementation of additional musical activities. Cilj ovog istraživanja, koje je uključivalo odgojitelje u vrtiću, bio je istražiti područje rada s glazbeno nadarenom djecom. Posebno smo se usredotočili na otkrivanje glazbeno nadarene djece i praćenje njihovog glazbenog napretka, kompetencije odgojitelja za rad s djecom i procjenom čimbenika važnih za razvoj glazbeno nadarene djece. Rezultati istraživanja pokazali su da je većina odgojitelja: uspjela otkriti glazbeno nadarenu djecu; rijetko su sustavno pratili i dokumentirali glazbeni napredak djece i nisu stekli dovoljno znanja za rad s glazbeno nadarenom djecom tijekom svog formalnog i neformalnog obrazovanja. Među važnim čimbenicima koji utječu na razvoj glazbeno nadarene djece odgojitelji su istaknuli motivaciju za rad s glazbeno nadarenom djecom, otkrivanje glazbeno nadarene djece, suradnju s glazbenim stručnjacima i roditeljima te provedbu dodatnih glazbenih aktivnosti. (shrink)

This study linked background TV and socioeconomic status to minority children’s Persian vocabulary development. To this end, 80 Iranian preschool children from two minority groups of Arabs and Turks were selected using stratified random sampling. They were simultaneous bilinguals, i.e., their mother tongue was either Arabic or Azari and their first language was Persian. Language sample analysis was used to measure vocabulary development through a 15-min interview by language experts. The LSA measures included total number of utterances, total number of (...) words, total number of new words, and mean length of utterance. A series of independent-samples t test, paired-samples t test, and repeated measures MANOVA tests were ran to examine data. Results showed significant improvements in children’s vocabulary scores from pretest to posttest for all children. In addition, high-SES children scored higher on the vocabulary measures in pretest and posttest. Moreover, background TV was associated with higher means in the TNW and the NDW in groups. The researchers concluded that background TV may be related to higher vocabulary scores in low-SES families as it may compensate for some linguistics gaps in these families including lower amount of child-parent interaction, play, and parents’ level of literacy. (shrink)

This paper proposes extending the appearance of artefacts from human to zoomorphic on the basis of the uncanny valley phenomenon, while simultaneously realising the effects of bionic species, product realism, and gender differences on preschool children’s preferences for artificial animal appearances. In this study, animal toys were created as stimuli and a three-factor experiment was conducted with preschool children. Overall, the children demonstrated significantly stronger preferences for animal toys with extremely high or moderate realism compared with those with extremely low (...) realism. Specifically, the boys preferred the toys with extremely high realism, and the girls preferred those with moderate realism. We conclude with some suggestions regarding the direction of design guidelines for the appearance of artificial animals, to facilitate the design and creation of animal products that promote human–robot interactions and design education. (shrink)

Prospective preschool teachers often incorporate picturebooks into their teaching practices in kindergartens as part of their training. However, they often rely heavily on asking children numerous questions while reading picturebooks, such as identifying the protagonists of the story, detailing the sequence of events, and exploring the who, what, when, where, and why. This approach may result in a superficial interrogation of the text, overlooking (i) the nuanced messages conveyed through illustrations or the synergy of text and imagery, and (ii) the (...) potential opportunities that could arise if children were encouraged to pose their own inquiries through philosophical exploration, delving deeper into the themes presented in picturebooks. This research was conducted in 2023 with 36 prospective preschool teachers from the University of Crete, Greece. The research comprises two phases. In the initial phase, the student teachers established a philosophical community of inquiry and acquired several philosophical inquiry skills. Following each inquiry session, student teachers engaged in self-reflection and assessed their contributions, identifying aspects of their experience that are applicable to using picturebooks with kindergarten children. They then developed lesson plans centred around the philosophical exploration of these picturebooks. In the subsequent phase, student teachers received supervision as they implemented their lesson plans in a kindergarten and subsequently reflected on their teaching experiences. The findings illustrate both the advantages and challenges encountered by prospective preschool teachers when approaching literature from a philosophical perspective. Additionally, the student teachers reflected on the interconnectedness of literature and philosophy, as well as the potential benefits for both educators and children through this integrated approach. A correction to this article was published on 22 January 2025. (shrink)

Research on children's developing moral cognition has mostly focused on their evaluation of, and reasoning about, others' intrinsically harmful (non-)verbal actions (e.g., hitting, lying). But assertions may have morally relevant (intended or unintended) consequences, too. For instance, if someone wrongly claims that “This water is clean!”, such an incorrect representation of reality may have harmful consequences to others. In two experiments, we investigated preschoolers' evaluation of others' morally relevant factual claims. In Experiment 1, children witnessed a puppet making incorrect (...) assertions that would lead to harm or to no harm. In Experiment 2, incorrect assertions would always lead to harm, but the puppet either intended the harm to occur or not. Children evaluated the puppet’s factual claim more negatively when they anticipated harmful versus harmless consequences (Experiment 1) and when the puppet’s intention was bad versus good over and above harmful consequences (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that preschoolers’ normative understanding is not limited to evaluating others’ intrinsically harmful transgressions, but also entails an appreciation of the morally relevant consequences of, and intentions underlying, others’ factual claims. (shrink)

Five-year-old children categorized as skilled versus unskilled counters were given verbal estimation and number word comprehension tasks with numerosities 20 – 120. Skilled counters showed a linear relation between number words and nonsymbolic numerosities. Unskilled counters showed the same linear relation for smaller numbers to which they could count, but not for larger number words. Further tasks indicated that unskilled counters failed even to correctly order large number words differing by a 2 : 1 ratio, whereas they performed well on (...) this task with smaller numbers, and performed well on a nonsymbolic ordering task with the same numerosities. These findings provide evidence that large, approximate numerosity representations become linked to number words around the time that children learn to count to those words reliably. (shrink)

The present study examined how two- to four-year-old preschoolers in Singapore (N = 202) balance fairness and ingroup loyalty in resource distribution. Specifically, we investigated whether children would enact fair distributions as defined by an equality rule, or show partiality toward their ingroup when distributing resources, and the conditions under which one distributive strategy may take precedence over the other. In Experiment 1, children distributed four different pairs of toys between two puppets. In the Group condition, one puppet was (...) assigned to the same group as the child while the other puppet was assigned to a different group using colored stickers in a minimal group paradigm; in the No Group condition, no group assignments were made. Children’s distributions in each condition were assessed for whether the toys were fairly (equally) distributed or unfairly (unequally) distributed in favor of either puppet. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that a third identical toy was introduced following the distribution of each toy pair. Distributions were separately assessed for whether the first two toys were fairly (equally) distributed or unfairly (unequally) distributed in favor of either puppet, and whether children distributed the third toy to the ingroup or outgroup puppet. Overall, the vast majority of children abided by an equality rule when resources were precisely enough to be shared between recipients, but distributed favorably to the ingroup member when there was limited resource availability. We found that fairness trumped ingroup loyalty except in resource distribution involving limited resources. Our findings are consistent with findings from other resource distribution studies with preschoolers and similar studies measuring young infants’ expectations of distributive behaviors in third-party observations. Taken together, there is evidence suggesting stability in the development of knowledge to behavior in the subdomains of fairness and ingroup loyalty. (shrink)

Thirty-years research seemed to reveal that there is a U-shape development in children’s theory-of-mind abilities: infants have the competence to attribute false beliefs properly when measured by looking time and anticipatory eye gaze, while children younger than four systematically fail the standard false belief tasks measuring their voluntary responses. Why is it, and why does the infants’ implicit belief reasoning seem to be free from the inhibition and selection requirements? Are there really two systems, one explicit measured by verbal tasks (...) and one implicit shown in non-verbal context, involved in theory-of-mind reasoning? We investigated preschoolers’ and adults’ belief attribution with the anticipatory looking method, in both a low-demand and high-demand false-belief reasoning tasks. Subjects’ nonverbal performances turned out to be better in the low-demand condition: they showed strong bias to look at the locations congruent with the actor’s false belief. However, neither adults’ nor children’s eye gaze in the high-demand condition showed belief-congruent anticipations. Besides, adults’ predictions were better with verbal responses than with nonverbal anticipatory eye gaze. Together, these results suggested that there are dual systems involved in belief reasoning, and the two systems share similar property in terms of their sensitivity to the task demands. (shrink)

Self-regulation in early childhood is an important predictor of success across a variety of indicators in life, including health, well-being, and earnings. Although conceptually self-regulation has been defined as multifaceted, previous research has not investigated whether there is conceptual and empirical overlap between the factors that comprise self-regulation or if they are distinct. In this study, using a bifactor model, we tested the shared and unique variance among self-regulation constructs and prediction to pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The sample included 932 (...) preschool children, their parents, and their teachers in the United States. Children’s self-regulation was assessed using measures of executive function, behavioral self-regulation, and emotion regulation. The bifactor model demonstrated a common overarching self-regulation factor, as well as distinct executive function and emotion regulation factors. The common overarching self-regulation factor and executive function predicted children’s pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The emotion regulation factor predicted children’s social-emotional skills. Identifying the shared and unique aspects of self-regulation may have important implications for supporting children’s regulatory skills as well as their success in school. (shrink)

European policy has seen a number of changes and innovations in the field of early childhood preschool education over the last decade, which have been reflected in various forms in the policies of individual EU countries. Within the Czech preschool policy, certain innovations and approaches have been implemented in the field of early children education, such as the introduction of compulsory preschool education before entering primary school from 2017, emphasis on inclusive education, equal conditions in education and enabling state-supported diversity (...) in the education concepts of kindergartens. The aim of our study was to assess the influence of various preschool education systems in the Czech Republic in the context of psychological variables reflecting selected children’s outcomes which may contribute to future school achievement. The monitored variables were the attitudes, motivations and executive functions of children in the last year of preschool education. A comparison was made between the traditional preschool education program and the so-called alternative types of preschool education, such as Montessori, Waldorf and religious schools. The total sample was divided into four subgroups, namely a group of children attending traditional kindergartens, religious, Montessori, and Waldorf kindergartens. To determine empirical data, the following research methods were used: Attitude Questionnaire, School Performance Motivation Scale, and Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function. The results of our survey show the fact that the type of kindergarten attended has a significant effect on the child’s level of school performance motivation, attitudes toward school as well as executive functions. Significant differences were found between the different types of kindergartens attended in the monitored variables. (shrink)

Introduction : before school -- Small miracles -- Life way after preschool -- The futures market -- The imprimatur of science -- Who cares for the children? -- Jump-starting a movement -- The politics of the un-dramatic -- English lessons -- Kids-first politics.

Teorijski okvir studije predstavljaju dva koncepta: međugeneracijko učenje i profesionalno usavršavanje. Kvantitativno istraživanje provedeno 2021. godine na uzorku od 108 odgojitelja predškolskih ustanova banjolučke regije imalo je za cilj ispitati perspektivu odgojitelja o čimbenicima međugeneracijskog učenja važnima za vlastito profesionalno usavršavanje. Korištenjem faktorske analize izdvojena su tri čimbenika međugeneracijskog učenja iz perspektive odgojitelja i to su: profesionalna suradnja i osobni rast; inkluzija starijih u odgojno obrazovni rad i humanističko obrazovanje; predrasude i stereotipi. Nalazi ukazuju na to da odgojitelji naglašeno prepoznaju (...) međugeneracijsko učenje u kontekstu osobnoga rasta, rada i karijere, ali također uočavaju i human i inkluzivni karakter međugeneracijske suradnje, dok nisu skloni međugeneracijskim stereotipima i predrasudama prema kolegama iz drugih generacija. Poticanje profesionalne suradnje te promicanje i potpora inkluziji starijih mogu pridonijeti smanjenju međugeneracijskih sukoba i predrasuda. (shrink)

In this handbook, I put into practice my philosophical views on children's mathematics. The handbook contains brief instructions and examples of mathematical activities. In the INSTRUCTIONS section, instructions are given on how, and in part why that way, to help preschool children in their mathematical development. In the ACTIVITIES section, there are examples of activities through which the child develops her mathematical abilities.

Owned objects are typically viewed as non-fungible-they cannot be freely interchanged. We report three experiments (total N=312) demonstrating this intuition in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, children considered an agent who takes one of two identical objects and leaves the other for a peer. Children viewed this as acceptable when the agent took his own item, but not when he took his peer's item. In Experiment 2, children considered scenarios where one agent took property from another. Children said the victim (...) could take back her own property from the perpetrator, but that she could not take an identical object belonging to the perpetrator. Finally, in Experiment 3A and 3B, children considered scenarios where a teacher could give a child either of two objects to play with-an object that the child had recently played with, or another object that looked the same. Children were more likely to say that the teacher should give the object recently played with when it belonged to the child, compared with when it belonged to the teacher. These findings are informative about the basis of judgments that property is non-fungible, and about young children's representation of ownership rights. They show that children's representation of ownership rights is not limited to principles protecting owners from being deprived. Our findings instead suggest that ownership rights are viewed as pertaining to individual objects. (shrink)

This study intended to explore the current status of psychological problems of preschool teachers in Southwest China 1 year after the COVID-19 pandemic and to assess the association between mental health education and psychological problems and symptoms of psychopathology. A total of 614 preschool teachers from Southwest China were enrolled to complete the questionnaires of the Chinese Symptom Checklist. Notably, 60% of the respondents reported psychological distress with GSI T-scores ≥ 63, especially the high score was reported on obsessive-compulsive disorder, (...) interpersonal sensitivity, and phobic anxiety. Although less than half of the respondents have received mental health education last year, the teachers who received the mental health education reported lower GSI T-scores. The results demonstrated the significance of constructing the education of promoting mental health of preschool teachers, and enlightening government or managers of kindergartens to relieve the psychological problems of preschool teachers through mental health education, especially for those with the pressure of overtime. It is recommended that local governments or kindergartens should organize more mental health education for kindergarten teachers to improve their mental health as well as their teaching professionalism. (shrink)

Understanding ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behavior. We provide evidence that preschoolers' and adults' judgments of ownership rights are related to their judgments of bodily rights. Four-year-olds and adults evaluated the acceptability of harmless actions targeting owned property and body parts. At both ages, evaluations did not vary for owned property or body parts. Instead, evaluations were influenced by two other manipulations—whether the target belonged to the agent or another person, and whether that other person approved of (...) the action. Moreover, these manipulations influenced judgments for owned objects and body parts in the same way: When the other person approved of the action, participants' judgments were positive regardless of who the target belonged to. In contrast, when that person disapproved, judgments depended on who the target belonged to. These findings show that young children grasp the importance of approval or consent for ownership rights and bodily rights, and likewise suggest that people's notions of ownership rights are related to their appreciation of bodily rights. (shrink)

Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., birds fly) about animals than artifacts. This may reflect differences in participants’ generic knowledge about specific animals/artifacts (e.g., dogs/chairs), or it may reflect a more general distinction. To test this, the current experiments asked adults and preschoolers to generate properties about novel animals and artifacts (Experiment 1: real animals/artifacts; Experiments 2 and 3: matched pairs of maximally similar, novel animals/artifacts). Data demonstrate that even without prior knowledge about these items, (...) the likelihood of producing a generic is significantly greater for animals than artifacts. These results leave open the question of whether this pattern is the product of experience and learned associations or instead a set of early-developing theories about animals and artifacts. (shrink)

Purpose:This experimental cross-sectional research study examined the emotional reactivity and emotion regulation in preschool-age children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS) by assessing their psychophysiological response during rest and while viewing pictures from the International Affective Picture System (Lang et al.,2008).Method:Participants were 18 CWS (16 boys and two girls; mean age 4 years, 5 months) and 18 age- and gender-matched CWNS. Participants' psychophysiological responses were measured during two baselines and two picture viewing conditions. Skin conductance level (SCL) and (...) heart rate were measured to assess emotional reactivity. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was measured to assess emotional regulation. Participants' shyness and executive function were assessed via parent report and considered for their effects on participants' psychophysiological responses.Results:First, CWNS and CWS did not differ in their initial baseline SCL, heart rate, or RSA, but all participants had higher SCL and lower RSA in the second baseline, subsequent to the first challenge condition, compared to the first baseline. Second, during the challenge conditions, CWS did not differ from CWNS in their SCL, but showed a significantly higher heart rate than CWNS. Third, CWS exhibited a significantly lower RSA during the challenge conditions compared to CWNS. Lastly, the temperamental quality of shyness was associated with preschool-age children's SCL, such that participants who were rated higher in shyness had a higher SCL during the challenge conditions. Participants' executive function had a marginally significant effect on the RSA, such that the participants who had higher executive function composite scores exhibited lower RSA during the challenge conditions.Conclusions:Our findings suggest that CWS and CWNS did not differ in their emotional reactivity and emotional regulation abilities at rest. During challenge conditions, however, CWS tended to be more emotionally reactive, as indicated by a higher heart rate, and also employed more emotional regulation, indexed by a greater decrease in RSA, compared to CWNS. Preschool-age children's behavior is largely dominated by reactivity, but there is the emergence of regulation, which can help children adjust to various contextual demands. For CWS who are more emotionally reactive, regulatory skills may be particularly critical to their prognosis and treatment. (shrink)

Unobservable properties that are specific to individuals, such as their proper names, can only be known by people who are familiar with those individuals. Do young children utilize this “familiarity principle” when learning language? Experiment 1 tested whether forty-eight 2- to 4-year-old children were able to determine the referent of a proper name such as “Jessie” based on the knowledge that the speaker was familiar with one individual but unfamiliar with the other. Even 2-year-olds successfully identified Jessie as the individual (...) with whom the speaker was familiar. Experiment 2 examined whether children appreciate this principle at a general level, as do adults, or whether this knowledge may be specific to certain word-learning situations. To test this, forty-eight 3- to 5-year-old children were given the converse of the task in Experiment 1—they were asked to determine the individual with whom the speaker was familiar based on the speaker’s knowledge of an individual’s proper name. Only 5-year-olds reliably succeeded at this task, suggesting that a general understanding of the familiarity principle is a relatively late developmental accomplishment. (shrink)

In the present meta-analysis, we examined the effect of cognitive training on the Executive Function (EF) of preschool children (age range: 3-6 years). We selected a final set of 32 studies from 27 papers with a total sample of 123 effect sizes. We found an overall effect of cognitive training for improving EF (g =.352; k = 123; p <.001), without significant difference between near and far transfer effects on executive domains. No significant additional outcome effects were found for behavioral- (...) and learning-related outcomes. Cognitive training programs for preschoolers are significantly more effective for developmentally at-risk children (ADHD or low socio-economic status) than for children with typical development and without risks. Other significant moderators were computerized versus non-computerized training, individual versus group sessions, and length of training. The number of sessions was not a significant moderator. This is the first demonstration of cognitive training far transfer effects among different executive processes. We discuss this result in relationship with the lower level of modularization of EFs in younger children. (shrink)

Young children, in general, appear to have a strong drive to explore the environment in ways that reveal its underlying causal structure. But are they really attuned specifically to casual information in this quest for understanding, or do they show equal interest in other types of non-obvious information about the world? To answer this question, we introduced 20 three-year-old children to two puppets who were anxious to tell the child about a set of novel artifacts and animals. One puppet consistently (...) described causal properties of the items while the other puppet consistently described carefully matched non-causal properties of the same items. After a familiarization period in which children learned which type of information to expect from each informant, children were given the opportunity to choose which they wanted to hear describe each of eight pictured test items. On average, children chose to hear from the informant that provided causal descriptions on 72% of the trials. This preference for causal information has important implications for explaining the role of conceptual information in supporting early learning and may suggest means for maximizing interest and motivation in young children. (shrink)

Preschool children have been proven to possess nonsymbolic approximate arithmetic skills before learning how to manipulate symbolic math and thus before any formal math instruction. It has been assumed that nonsymbolic approximate math tasks necessitate the allocation of Working Memory (WM) resources. WM has been consistently shown to be an important predictor of children's math development and achievement. The aim of our study was to uncover the specific role of WM in nonsymbolic approximate math. For this purpose, we conducted a (...) dual-task study with preschoolers with active phonological, visual, spatial, and central executive interference during the completion of a nonsymbolic approximate addition dot task. With regard to the role of WM, we found a clear performance breakdown in the central executive interference condition. Our findings provide insight into the underlying cognitive processes involved in storing and manipulating nonsymbolic approximate numerosities during early arithmetic. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the face recognition and emotion recognition algorithms to monitor the emotions of preschool children. For previous emotion recognition focusing on faces, we propose to obtain more comprehensive information from faces, gestures, and contexts. Using the deep learning approach, we design a more lightweight network structure to reduce the number of parameters and save computational resources. There are not only innovations in applications, but also algorithmic enhancements. And face annotation is performed on the dataset, while a (...) hierarchical sampling method is designed to alleviate the data imbalance phenomenon that exists in the dataset. A new feature descriptor, called “oriented gradient histogram from three orthogonal planes,” is proposed to characterize facial appearance variations. A new efficient geometric feature is also proposed to capture facial contour variations, and the role of audio methods in emotion recognition is explored. Multifeature fusion can be used to optimally combine different features. The experimental results show that the method is very effective compared to other recent methods in dealing with facial expression recognition problems about videos in both laboratory-controlled environments and outdoor environments. The method performed experiments on expression detection in a facial expression database. The experimental results are compared with data from previous studies and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed new method. (shrink)

Enhancing teacher leadership is not only one of the approaches to improving teaching and learning, but it is also essential to the success of education reform. Based on leader-member exchange theory, 294 preschool teachers in China were surveyed, and a structural equation model was established to explore the relationship between the participating teachers' principal leadership style, teacher leadership and psychological capital. The findings revealed a significant positive correlation between transformational and transactional leadership styles and preschool teacher leadership. The laissez-faire leadership (...) style had no correlation with preschool teacher leadership. The transformational leadership style and transactional leadership style were significantly and positively correlated with psychological capital, while the laissez-faire leadership style was significantly and negatively correlated with psychological capital. The transformational leadership style can positively influence preschool teacher leadership directly and indirectly through psychological capital; and the transactional leadership style can only positively influence preschool teacher leadership indirectly through the mediating role of psychological capital. Preschool teachers' leadership can neither be directly influenced by a laissez-faire leadership style nor be indirectly influenced through the mediating role of psychological capital. (shrink)