I see the limitless possibilities of space in children. To understand the creation and functioning of the universe, NASA says we should start investigating from the Big Bang. I probably could not tell a lot about the events that followed the Big Bang. However, what I strongly believe is that thousands of such bangs take place in a child’s universe.

What is the secret of a child’s universe?

Many sociological, psychological and ethnographic studies have questioned the understanding of a child as an egocentric and cognitively immature being. The studies in question supported the understanding of a child as a powerful and competent being. The child creates and questions the old. It lays down new rules, questioning all that surrounds and fascinates them. Children explore themselves and the world around them through their play.

The child sees every situation as an opportunity to learn, expand and change.

Brain studies have confirmed that learning engages the entire body. In this connection, learning is a mental and physical process. A particularly important quality of learning in children is that this is a social process – a joint formation of knowledge and meaning. On a recommendation of my dear co-worker Dragana, I read an interesting article published by The Guardian titled How children learn – and why robots can’t compete?. The article raises a series of important questions. A particularly interesting story is the one about a father, an expert for artificial intelligence and robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who tried to “raise” a robot following the way his child learns. You are probably wondering about the findings of this venture. Raising a child, directed this father to think about the learning methods in people rather than creating a robot who can compete with a human.

Why can’t robots compete with the way children learn?

Learning is a complex, interactive, social and joint process. When learning, children build new meanings and share their feelings. Precisely because learning is a social process, engaging the mind and the body, the “future of intelligence is not in machines, but in the development of our own minds”. Even more importantly, in building relationships. This story inspired me, so I started to explore artificial intelligence. It turned out that many studies related to this issue focused on developmental psychology and developing programs based on children learning principles.

If you ask me what the secret of a child’s universe is and how they approach the exploration of the world around them, I would say that the answer is in the child’s openness, inquisitiveness, curiosity and wish to share what they do with others. Every bang in their universe leads to a new question and exploration.

How shall we know when the bang occurs? Like a newly-born star, you will spot how the child’s face lightens up.

Such radiation is followed by the wish to ask, know and do more. In order to explore the universe, children, like astronauts on their mission, often defy the laws of physics.

How adults use technologies will greatly influence the manner in which the child uses them. Copyright: Syda Productions

How did exploring the universe become digital?

Children found another way to express themselves and explore the world around them. Watching a boy who encountered a VR headset for the first time during last year’s Friendship Games, you could see, in addition to cries of joy and excitement, an important and magical change. A desire to know more appeared, to ask new questions, share this experience with other children and volunteers and to take part in encountering the new and the unexplored. Big and unexplored areas, such as the cosmos or digital space, cause apprehension and give rise to the question – what lurks in the dark and remote places of these expenses.

Every technological discovery leads to a change. Will the augur of that change be positive or negative depends on the attitudes we develop regarding the use of technologies.

These attitudes cannot be reduced to mere technical skills, because the children are very skilled at that. It relates to something much more important – developing a culture of using technologies. Developing a culture of using technologies represents a life-long process during which we develop our attitude based on the interaction with other unique and close universes (parents, siblings, and others from your environment). How adults use technologies will greatly influence the manner in which the child uses them.

Direct contact (look, kiss, hug, touch) between a child and adult cannot be substituted by anything. The value of such contact is immeasurable. However, we cannot doubt the power of our children to face the digital. It is necessary to explore the unexplored with them. So, put on your astronaut suits on time, listen to your children and ask and answer questions.

The little girl, which now lives in the body of a 25-year-old woman, is thankful to everyone, and especially her parents, who explored the universe with her, imagined and created and still continue to do so. Now, every sunset results in new questions, which are poured from the sky like dyes into a new exploration, which is often recorded with the camera on her phone.

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Jelena Stojkovic is a Djokovic Scholar, class 2018/22.    The program Djokovic Scholars at the University of Belgrade was launched in 2018 and thanks to this scholarship, Jelena now attends a Ph.D. program at the Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Pedagogy and Andragogy. Her research interests encompass early childhood education and development in the modern world, child rights issues and their participation in society, as well as the role of digital technologies in ECD.

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A small group of young pupils centers around their teacher on the floor and listens patiently. After pointing out the colour yellow once, the teacher asks the kids to find other yellow coloured objects in the room. The pupils quickly find a variety of yellow coloured items. Before getting bored of the activity, the teacher directs them to the craft table asking: “what other items can you think of that are yellow? Go and draw or craft them.”

The Origin of the Theory Behind the Questioning Techniques

There has been a major transition in teaching methods at schools and nurseries. More and more teachers focus on the above illustrated child-initiative approach rather than the conventional teacher-led approach in order to improve pupils’ engagement with the educational material covered in class and to support them in constructing their own higher-level knowledge. Asking children questions and waiting for them to come up with answers is the central idea of this approach.

Copyright: Syda Productions

The educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom was the first researcher who took learning to another level by arguing that children could improve their knowledge skills when they were asked to answer more critical questions by their teachers. In 1956, he developed a hierarchy of questions which would enable teachers to measure and organise their teaching objectives by using six different levels of questioning: remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, synthesising and evaluating. He called this hierarchy the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Bloom proposed that all human beings follow an imaginary ranking of levels when it comes to the complexity of thought. This means that children start to operate at a very “concrete” level of knowledge before they move on to be able to “comprehend” what the facts are. At the next level, children are able to “apply” what they have learned from facts and comprehension. This is the stage where they can demonstrate knowledge and apply it to related situations. Moving on, children can “analyse” what they know such as categorizing information. At the two highest stages of “synthesising” and “evaluating”, Bloom suggested that children are able to form solutions and make judgments about information and situations.

Bloom’s Revised Levels of Questioning in the Classroom

In the early 1990s, researchers revised the taxonomy to make the theory more relevant to the needs of children in today’s world. They decided to add an additional step to the hierarchy called creating while deleting the level of synthesising.

When asking teachers about their preferred activities in class, many will answer that they try to engage young pupils by using Bloom’s questioning techniques. The main idea is that the difficulty of the questions increases by each level. The higher-level questions require deeper thinking and can help children to expand their knowledge on topics or improve their thinking skills.

Copyright: Monkey Business Images

Parents and teachers can track the progress preschoolers make easily. They only have to observe pupils’ ability to answer a question of the next level of knowledge. According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), three year olds usually operate at the most basic level of the hierarchy being referred to as concrete thinkers. This means that they concentrate on physical things that are right in front of them. Older children will have the ability to move along the hierarchy to stages that allow abstract ways of thinking. Most children at that age of four engage in more imagination-focused playing activities such as fantasising that a spoon is a wooden stick. Therefore, preschoolers should be able to answer more complicated questions than younger children.

When applying Bloom’s questioning techniques in the classroom, some three year olds and most four year olds are able to follow abstract concepts of thinking including analysing, evaluating and creating. The NAEYC recommends that parents and teachers should not be concerned if some children may not be able to answer higher-level questions. This is because children develop at different rates and may need longer to develop more abstract levels of thinking.

Asking Children Questions Outside the Classroom

When it comes to developing better thinking skills, parents can support their children in the same way teachers do in the classroom. A good starting point is by keeping a record of how frequently children have to answer questions and whether there is a good variation in the levels of the questions asked. It is important that children have a solid base of information when answering questions. Therefore, it can be helpful to ask children basic questions after reading a story in a book which supplies the necessary background. It is also possible to encourage children to answer more difficult questions to make progress. Even if children may not be able to answer the question correctly their answers may still be surprising.

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In spite of the differences in education, culture, and economics across the globe, one thing remains clear in every community: quality early childhood care and education yields countless positive cognitive, social, and emotional development effects. Since the 1930’s a growing body of evidence demonstrates that investing in the first five years of a child’s life has lasting effects, more so than just health or financial interventions alone.

Disparity of Access to ECE

Unfortunately, in spite of understanding the importance of early childhood education, there is a disparity in who has access to it. Further, there is significant research demonstrating that it is not just access to early childhood care and education that we need to be worrying about, but also the quality of that care.

Across the globe, access to early childhood education varies wildly. In Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Yemen, and many other nations, less than ten percent of children have access to early childhood education programs. This is in contrast to countries like Jamaica and Belarus where approximately 90% of children have access to early childhood education programs.  Both economics and race are at play in these statistics. In many nations, such as Ukraine, Ghana, and Mongolia, families in the richest quarter of the population are more than twice as likely to have access to early childhood education programs than those in the poorest 25%.

Early Childhood Education: Economic Impact

Economics not only impact which children are available to access early childhood education programs, but the quality of the programs that they are accessing. Generally speaking, early childhood educational programs in nations with higher incomes result in average positive impacts across cognitive, social development, education, and health changes that were approximately 20 percent higher than those in lower-income nations.

Editorial Credit: Patrik Dietrich / Shutterstock.com

The disparity between higher and lower income nations is likely the result of the difference in quality between the interventions that are possible for children in the different economies. This idea has since been verified in more controlled settings. In Mauritius, for example, a randomized trial between high-quality and average quality early childhood education showed that all received positive benefits, but the higher quality interventions resulted in more positive early cognitive effects and reductions in later conduct disorders.

The Acess to ECE: Race Issues

Race is another critical indicator of the likeliness of a child to access high quality early childhood care. In the United States, for instance, of the children who do have access to educational programs, Hispanic children are more likely to access high quality programs than black children. Unfortunately, black children in the United States are least likely to be in a high-quality setting and most likely to be a low-quality early childhood program. Comparing the United States against other nations in educational performance reveals that the nation’s lackluster performance on testing is not due to economic diversity alone, given that many poorer nations outperformed American students. That suggests that the racial disparities, often resulting from racial residential segregation, are in part to blame for the nations performance as a whole.

Copyright: spass

So why does this need to change? Focusing on early childhood education has demonstrated marked improvements in the lives of children across the globe. Countless studies have demonstrated that effective early childhood education results in both short- and long-term effects on intelligence, subject matter knowledge, social behaviors, executive functions, delinquency, crime, and mental health including depression. In addition to all of these benefits for the children, prior research (most of which has focused exclusively on the United States) highlights the value gained from early childhood care and education.

Benefits of an Improved Access and Quality of ECE

Improved access and quality of early childhood development programs is correlated to an increase both short-term gains for maternal employment and long-term gains for the child’s subsequent earning potential. This result was particularly important for low- and middle-income families. Increasing pre-kindergarten enrollment from 25 to 50% would have a cost-to-benefit ratio between 6 and 17 to one based solely on earnings increases. The true benefits would likely be even higher, given the reduction in costs associated with grade repetitions for low-performing students, reduced need for costly special-education programs, and reduced pressure on the criminal justice and healthcare systems.

The importance of early childhood education is not just limited to young children. The impacts on children’s lives are long lasting and ripple throughout a community. Increased access to early childhood education decreases the incidence of crime, diminishes healthcare challenges, and overall benefits the economy. Nations and communities, need to focus their attention on the first five years of development, particularly in children of low- and middle-income and previously underserved races, to improve access to early childhood education and consequently strengthen their communities as a whole.

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For us,  at NDF, the concept of family is of the outmost importance and through our work, we strive to help and empower the family to be better, stronger and safer for each and every member of the society. When families are strong, that’s when we see the most progress in the society. That’s when we see early childhood development at its prime.

So today, on the Global Day of Parents, we are taking a moment to appreciate all the parents and parental figures around the world for the vital role they play in the development of the family, and subsequently, children. We thank them for their never-ending work and patience. We would be nothing if it wasn’t for you!

Copyright: Alliance

Here is our selection on texts on parenting. Enjoy!

All They Need Is Love

5 Tips that Can Help Your Child Learn Better

How to Identify a Gifted Child and Encourage Its Talents?

‘Good Enough’ Parents

What Qualities Do Parents Value Based on Their Education?

How to Prevent Children from Thinking Negative about Themselves?

Overparenting Trap and How to Avoid It

Outsourced Parenting

Bringing up Girls

Outcomes of Divorce

A Working Mom Is More Likely to Have a Successful Daughter or a Caring Son

Time in or Time out

Why French Parents Are Superior

How to Talk to Your Kids to Instill a Growth Mindset

Parenting in a Violent World

7 Tips for Raising a Caring Child

The Hidden Benefits of Reading Aloud to Children

How Do Parenting Lessons Benefit Parents and Children?

5 Books You Should Read on Effective Parenting

Make Optimism the Way of Life for Your Child

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It also explores the often overlooked importance of the role the parent plays – especially the Mother:

• – How important is it for Moms to stay at home with their children during early learning?
• – What steps can working Moms take to secure the best educational foundation for their child?

The last segment compares the different education paths taken by countries around the world. From birth to age 7, one can view the different educational institutions that several countries use to start their children’s education.

Via: www.schooltutoring.com

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