An Exploratory Study of Kindergarten Children’s Understandings About the Pedagogical and Social Nature of Kindergarten
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study was conducted to investigate what children saw as the pedagogical and social purposes of their kindergarten experiences during the 2010-2011 school year when education in Ontario began a transition in the length and focus of kindergarten programs. In a large suburban region of Ontario, junior kindergarten (JK) children and senior kindergarten (SK) children (N=263) from kindergarten programs in 12 elementary schools were interviewed, with sampling from the new Full-Day Early Learning Kindergarten Program (FDELK) as well as from traditional kindergarten programs where it had not yet been implemented. Using a puppet technique, children were interviewed about the pedagogical aspects of kindergarten, such as what activities they liked and what they felt were important, and what their teachers did. They were also asked about the social nature of kindergarten, for example how they would solve social problems in kindergarten, including dealing with social conflicts involving themselves and other children. Children’s responses to interview questions demonstrated that they distinguished between ‘play’ and ‘work’ (academic skills such as pre-reading and numeracy), in the activities they favoured (play) and in those they saw as being important (work), and in what they perceived their teachers do (work). The study showed a relationship between children’s responses to the interview questions and higher receptive vocabulary and early reading ability scores. Children who mentioned work-related concepts and who reported multiple strategies in peer conflict situations had higher scores in vocabulary and early reading. A common theme across most children’s responses was the importance that they attached to learning rules and to following them. Children associated their teachers’ roles with behaviour guidance and rule enforcement in addition to leading instruction and distributing academic work. Few children mentioned that their teachers’ role was to play with them. There were slight demographic differences found in this study. SK children’s pedagogical perceptions were work- and rule-related, and social perceptions included more strategic solutions to conflict in comparison to JK children. English language learners (ELL) were more likely to mention play and work to be important, and their teachers’ role to be work-related compared to English first language children (EFL).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".