Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemLiteracy and learning in preschool aged children(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemEvaluation of a parenting intervention aimed at improving preschool children's emotional competence : issues related to the measurement of emotion-focussed parenting skills(University of Melbourne, 2010)Emotional competence is thought to be related to a range of positive outcomes for children including their ability to develop effective social skills and form friendships, achieve well academically and reduce their likelihood of developing externalising or internalising difficulties. The way in which parents respond to their children�s emotions is thought to play a significant role in children�s emotional development. Tuning in to Kids, Emotionally Intelligent Parenting (TIK) is an emotion-focussed parenting intervention designed to teach parents the skills involved in emotion coaching with their children. The purpose of the current study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the TIK intervention and explore issues related to measuring changes in emotion-focussed parenting over time. The participants in this study were 95 preschool children (46 boys and 49 girls) and their parents who were allocated as either intervention or wait-list control. Assessments of parents� emotion coaching skills and children�s emotion knowledge were carried out prior to the intervention group beginning the parenting program and six months after they completed the program. Parents� emotion coaching was measured via a storytelling observation task and the Parent Emotional Styles Questionnaire. Children�s emotion knowledge was assessed using the Affective Knowledge Test. Results showed that parents who received the TIK intervention improved significantly more than the control group on both observed and self-reported emotion coaching 6 months after completing the program. No significant relationship was found between these two measures of emotion coaching suggesting the two measures captured different aspects of the construct, being parents� use of emotion coaching language compared to their beliefs and attitudes towards emotion coaching. Intervention group children�s emotion knowledge did not improve significantly more than the control group and there was no significant relationship between parents� emotion coaching and children�s emotion knowledge, suggesting elements of emotion coaching were not captured by the parent measures used. Future research on the definition and measurement of emotion coaching may extend the current findings regarding evaluation of emotion-focussed parenting programs.
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ItemHearing-impaired and normally hearing pre-school children's comprehension and production of shifting reference( 2000)This study investigated shifting reference in young hearing-impaired and normally hearing children. Shifting reference is a critical aspect of communication. Words that shift in reference are unstable in that the referent changes as the circumstances of a conversation change. However, the words do not change their meaning even when there is a change to the event, or object, or person to which the reference refers. A listener can only determine the referent through the use of shared knowledge of the previous event, or conversation or person, or by being able to take the perspective of the speaker. Shifting reference is seen as a difficult aspect of communication to acquire. This study involved three profoundly hearing-impaired children and three normally hearing children aged 5:3 to 5:8 years of age. The purpose of this study was to make an initial investigation into the comprehension and production of shifting reference in young hearing-impaired and normally hearing children in the year prior to primary school. The study also investigated the use of an intervention program that focused on exposing the children to the terms under consideration. The results from the study suggest that the hearing-impaired participants were showing a delay in their comprehension and production of shifting reference when compared with the normally hearing participants. The final assessment of the hearing-impaired participants indicated that the language intervention program had some positive effects, as there was some improvement in most of the selected targeted word categories. The data also suggested that the normally hearing children also benefited from the language intervention program as they improved in both comprehension and production, in the targeted areas where mastery had not been reached.
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ItemMapping the emergence of literacy-related knowledge in preschool students( 2009)This short-term longitudinal study investigated the emergence of literacy-related knowledge in typically developing preschool children aged between 3- and 6-years of age. The study comprised 68 children (42 males, 26 females; M age = 4.70, SD = 0.70) recruited from two early childhood settings and allocated to one of three age based cohorts (younger n = 17, M age = 3.83, SD = 0.16; middle n = 22, M age = 4.42, SD = 0.26; older n = 29, M age = 5.42, SD = 0.23). Each child completed a comprehensive suite of individual assessment tasks that incorporated oral, phonological, orthographic, alphabet and print knowledge, in addition to some aspects of conventional literacy knowledge (e.g., reading, writing). The tasks were re-administered six months later and complete literacy data were obtained on all measures for 54 children. Children's performance was compared across the three age cohorts and over the time of the study in order to examine the developmental progression of literacy-related knowledge during the preschool period (Study 1). The concurrent associations between measures of emergent literacy-related knowledge and conventional literacy knowledge were also explored for each of the cohorts (Study 2). Nonparametric and parametric analyses revealed group differences on many of the measures, particularly between the older preschool children and the two younger cohorts. Study 1 further demonstrated that literacy-related knowledge emerges early in some knowledge areas and that considerable growth in literacy-related knowledge occurs over a relatively short period of time, particularly between the ages of 4- and 5-years. Study 2 demonstrated that the associations between measures of emergent and conventional literacy knowledge generally increased with age and over time, indicating that emergent literacy-related knowledge and conventional literacy knowledge become more strongly associated during the preschool period. Overall, the results of this study indicate a clear developmental trend towards conventional literacy knowledge that commences in the preschool period. Important implications for early childhood education policy and practice are discussed.
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ItemMusic education in day care and pre-school( 2002)When I started out on this research I had two concerns. The first of these related to the general neglect of musical development in early childhood and its broader social and cultural significance. The second related to the special challenge associated with being an itinerant music specialist concerned with teacher education in the performing arts in day care centres and kindergartens. A window of opportunity opened up for my research in 1998 with the Federal Government's adoption of a National Framework for Accreditation of Child Care Centres that specified amongst its criteria the fostering of creative development and aesthetic awareness in early learning centres. My career background as a performing musician and music specialist in schools had provided me with essential knowledge of classroom music teaching and provided some awareness of the need at a practical level to conform to the social logic and community storylines of new settings. I had also been a proprietor of an early education centre in which I had taught music so was aware of the rules, regulations, procedures and protocol that operated in these settings as well as public interest in improved educational services in the day care centres. It was never my intention to measure the level of musical attainment or basic skills of the children. I sought initially to research and represent existing provision and practices of music education in the early childhood centres through a collaborative research agreement with directors and proprietors of the centres and to appraise the potential influence of a peripatetic music specialist in encouraging or empowering the generalist preschool teachers in this area. My initial view was that this was an issue of making staff more comfortable and confident in delivering a form of participatory community music programs in early learning centres. The research was re-defined after a pilot study showed that the poor employment practice and the regulatory regime in the centres meant staff had little or no time for personal-professional involvement in my sessions with the children and a lack of experience or training among staff mitigated against discussion. The redefined collaborative research agreement was a more conventional autoethnography in which I would represent my experiences as a provider over extended periods as a visiting music specialist in each of 5 centres. The research is still a social representation of the dilemma of early childhood music in the sense that arts education was understood at a number of symbolic levels, corporate and educational, to be worthwhile but neglected, but the representations do not quote staff in the centres to the same degree that I had anticipated. To understand this change in research direction is to understand in large measure the problem of music education in the centres. These social representations of music education in each centre are constructed at the intersection of my purposes and social reality in each centre where I was trying to understand the prospects and the conditions for Arts Education. The social representations are primarily theories of lay knowledge in early music education in Australia. The focus of the research has been on a form of thought and its products of which the staff seemed largely unaware. I was seeking to anchor and objectivize music education in these representations. These are globalizing processes. In the representations I sought to anchor my music teaching in each centre by a globalizing process that shows how I made the world of each centre simpler and more manageable. I was showing myself and attempting to show others how one copes with the complexity of music education at this level by grouping musical events and instruments or equipment used together with the children and showing them as similar or equivalent in my accounts. Similarly, I sought to objectify or reconstruct events for the reader that were technical and complex, into something that was less differentiated, similar to something already known and into something conventional. My hope is that these representations can be incorporated into the symbolic social environment and become ontologized in the artistic work of staff and others in early childhood centres.