Starting kids off right

Most children in Singapore attend kindergarten before entering the school system, but the impact of early childhood education on their future success and wellbeing is unclear.

A large-scale study, led by Dr Rebecca Bull at the Centre for Research in Child Development at NTU’s National Institute of Education, aimed to find out how factors such as teacher-child interaction, class size, teacher-child ratio and teaching qualification affect a child’s learning experiences, development outcomes and readiness for formal education.

The study was done over five years and involved 1,500 children and 120 teachers from 80 kindergartens and childcare centres across Singapore. The children were tested on a variety of competencies, including motor skills, cognitive abilities, socio-emotional capacities, language, literacy and numeracy, at four points between the start of kindergarten and the first year of school.

Conducted primarily to inform Singapore’s Ministry of Education on how best to advance teacher education, curricula and infrastructure at preschools, the study and its findings will soon be shared with teachers through workshops and professional development.

Preliminary findings from the study, highlighting pedagogical practices, classroom observation tools and child assessments, and issues related to teachers’ professional development, are published in “Assessing quality of kindergarten classrooms in Singapore: Psychometric properties of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale—Revised”, International Journal of Early Childhood (2017), DOI: 10.1007/s13158-017-0180-x; “Preschool educators’ interactions with children about sustainable development: Planned and incidental conversations”, International Journal of Early Childhood (2018), DOI: 10.1007/s13158-018-0213-0; and “Arts-related pedagogies in preschool education: An Asian perspective”, Early Childhood Research Quarterly (2018), DOI: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2017.12.005.

This article appeared first in NTU’s research & innovation magazine Pushing Frontiers (issue #13, June 2018).