Positive Psychology Competences of Pre-School Teachers as a Tool for Understanding and Nurturing Children's Play

2017 ◽  
pp. 134-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanja Tatalović Vorkapić ◽  
Petra Prović
Keyword(s):  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Preschool Teachers ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Children’S Play ◽  
The Common

The Positive Psychology frame and definition present a natural environment for understanding and researching children's play in the context of nurturing overall positive characteristics in children's development. Therefore, this article presents a structured review of the common ground between the basic principles of positive psychology and children's play in the context of early and preschool institutions. Also, it demonstrates the implementation of positive psychology principles in children's play and the methods by which positive psychology could be promoted through children's play in kindergartens. Within that frame, the importance is given to the needed preschool teachers' competences in this area. In this context, various activities are presented that reflect a common ground of positive psychology and children's play. Finally, some significant guidelines for future research and practice enhancement are presented.

Positive Psychology Competences of Pre-School Teachers as a Tool for Understanding and Nurturing Children's Play

2021 ◽  
pp. 498-516
Author(s):  
Sanja Tatalović Vorkapić ◽  
Petra Prović
Keyword(s):  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Preschool Teachers ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Children’S Play ◽  
The Common

The Positive Psychology frame and definition present a natural environment for understanding and researching children's play in the context of nurturing overall positive characteristics in children's development. Therefore, this article presents a structured review of the common ground between the basic principles of positive psychology and children's play in the context of early and preschool institutions. Also, it demonstrates the implementation of positive psychology principles in children's play and the methods by which positive psychology could be promoted through children's play in kindergartens. Within that frame, the importance is given to the needed preschool teachers' competences in this area. In this context, various activities are presented that reflect a common ground of positive psychology and children's play. Finally, some significant guidelines for future research and practice enhancement are presented.

scholarly journals How Students of Preschool Education Perceive Their Play Competences – An Analysis of Their Involvement in Children’s Play

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-130
Author(s):  
Sanja Tatalović Vorkapić ◽  
Vesna Katić
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Preschool Teachers ◽  
Preschool Education ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Educational Work ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Children’S Play

Preschool teachers play a very important but highly sensitive role in preschool children’s play. It is therefore very important to build their play competences in a quality way. As this is not easily achieved, the main objective of the present study was to analyse the roles of students of preschool education in children’s play. The study included 36 students enrolled at the Faculty of Teacher Education in Rijeka, Croatia. Through a qualitative analysis of the students’ preparations for their practice, it was determined that the majority of students use didactic play and play with rules with children. Although the students demonstrated the expected role in children’s play, which positively influenced the educational work and the overall well-being of the children, some of the students were not decisive. Thus, the question arises as to how to improve the acquisition of play competences in students of preschool education.

scholarly journals Development and Evaluation of A New Measure of Children’s Play: The Children’s Play Scale (CPS)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Dodd ◽  
Rachel J. Nesbit ◽  
Laura Maratchi
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Parent Report ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Public Health Perspective ◽  
Informant Agreement ◽  
Retest Reliability ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Children’S Play ◽  
Test Retest Reliability

Abstract Background There is increasing recognition of the importance of children’s play from a public health perspective given the links between play and children’s physical and mental health. The present research aimed to develop and evaluate a new parent-report questionnaire that measures the time children spend playing and how adventurously children play, across a range of places.Method The questionnaire was developed with input from a diverse group of parents and experts in children’s play. It was designed to yield a range of metrics including time spent playing per year, time spent playing outside, time spent playing in nature and level of adventurous play. The reliability of the questionnaire was then evaluated with 245 parents (149 mothers, 96 fathers) of 154 children aged 5 to 11 years. All participants completed the measure at time 1. At time 2, an average of 20 days later, 184 parents (111 mothers and 73 fathers) of 99 children completed the measure again. Results Cross-informant agreement, evaluated using Concordance Correlation Coefficients (CCCs), ranged from 0.36 to 0.51. These fall in the poor to moderate range and are largely comparable to cross-informant agreement on other measures. Test-retest reliability for mothers was good (range 0.67 - 0.76) for time spent playing metrics. For fathers, test-retest reliability was lower (range 0.39 - 0.63). For both parents the average level of adventurous play variable had relatively poor test retest reliability (mothers = 0.49, fathers = 0.42). This variable also showed a significant increase from time 1 to time 2. This instability over time may be due to the timing of the research in relation to the Covid-19 lockdown and associated shifts in risk perception.Conclusions The measure will be of value in future research focusing on the public health benefits and correlates of children’s play as well as researchers interested in children’s outdoor play and play in nature specifically. The development of the measure in collaboration with parents and experts in children’s play is a significant strength. It will be of value for future research to further validate the measure against play diaries or activity monitors.

scholarly journals Unequal Education in Preschool

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Jessica Prioletta
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Preschool Teachers ◽  
Ethics Of Care ◽  
Early Learning ◽  
Education For All ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
Children’S Play ◽  
Gender Power

In this article, I explore how the beliefs of preschool teachers that equality is the norm in their classrooms shape play periods in ways that may work to disadvantage girls. I argue that equality discourses mask the gender power children must negotiate in their play and that this leaves girls with fewer choices when they are accessing the play environment. With research grounded in fieldwork carried out in four public schools in a Canadian metropolis, I illustrate how liberal notions of equality reinforced the traditional gender binary in children’s play. Moreover, drawing on the work of Jane Roland Martin, I show that liberal understandings of equality work to sustain a male-centered education for all students in preschool. To explore ways to attend to such gender inequalities, I turn to Nel Noddings’s concept of an ethics of care and point to the need to challenge the gender binary in early learning.

scholarly journals Development and evaluation of a new measure of children’s play: the Children’s Play Scale (CPS)

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen F. Dodd ◽  
Rachel J. Nesbit ◽  
Laura R. Maratchi
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Parent Report ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Public Health Perspective ◽  
Informant Agreement ◽  
Retest Reliability ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Children’S Play ◽  
Test Retest Reliability

Abstract Background There is increasing recognition of the importance of children’s play from a public health perspective, given the links between play and children’s physical and mental health. The present research aimed to develop and evaluate a new parent-report questionnaire that measures the time children spend playing across a range of places and includes a supplement to evaluate how adventurously children play. Methods The questionnaire was developed with input from a diverse group of parents and experts in children’s play. It was designed to yield a range of metrics including time spent playing per year, time spent playing outside, time spent playing in nature and level of adventurous play. The reliability of the questionnaire was then evaluated with 245 parents (149 mothers, 96 fathers) of 154 children aged 5–11 years. All participants completed the measure at time 1. At time 2, an average of 20 days later, 184 parents (111 mothers and 73 fathers) of 99 children completed the measure again. Results Cross-informant agreement, evaluated using Concordance Correlation Coefficients (CCCs), ranged from 0.36 to 0.51. These fall in the poor to moderate range and are largely comparable to cross-informant agreement on other measures. Test-retest reliability for mothers was good (range 0.67–0.76) for time spent playing metrics. For fathers, test-retest reliability was lower (range 0.39–0.63). For both parents the average level of adventurous play variable had relatively poor test retest reliability (mothers = 0.49, fathers = 0.42). This variable also showed a significant increase from time 1 to time 2. This instability over time may be due to the timing of the research in relation to the Covid-19 lockdown and associated shifts in risk perception. Conclusions The measure will be of value in future research focusing on the public health benefits and correlates of children’s play as well as researchers interested in children’s outdoor play and play in nature specifically. The development of the measure in collaboration with parents and experts in children’s play is a significant strength. It will be of value for future research to further validate the measure against play diaries or activity monitors.

The Child-Psychoanalytic Play Interview: A Technique for Studying Thematic Content

1991 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1015-1036 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Marans ◽  
Linda Mayes ◽  
Domenic Cicchetti ◽  
Kirsten Dahl ◽  
Wendy Marans ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Interobserver Agreement ◽  
Clinical Work ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Therapeutic Work ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Thematic Content ◽  
Play Session ◽  
Children’S Play ◽  
Investigative Technique

Child psychoanalysts have long viewed play as a reflection of children's inner lives and have used the themes children represent in play for diagnostic and therapeutic work. Given the central role children's play has for clinical work, few studies have addressed play empirically. This paper presents a technique for studying the thematic content of children's play as it emerges during a play session with a child analyst. We report the steps involved in developing this investigative technique and describe the interobserver agreement among four raters using the technique with videotaped play sessions. Implications for future research using such an approach are discussed.

scholarly journals Primal world beliefs correlate strongly but differentially with character strengths

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Stahlmann ◽  
Willibald Ruch
Keyword(s):  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Character Strengths ◽  
Personality Development ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Safe Place ◽  
Place Theory ◽  
Personality Differences ◽  
The World ◽  
German Speaking

Primal world beliefs–primals–are a category of beliefs about the overall character of the world (e.g., the world is a safe place). Theory suggests that such beliefs drive personality development–or at least reflect personality differences, such as character strengths. We examined the relationships of primals with character strengths among 1122 German-speaking adults. The primary primal good explained the most variance in the majority of character strengths, especially hope, spirituality, zest, gratitude, curiosity, and leadership. Including specific secondary (e.g., safe, enticing, alive) and tertiary primals (e.g., beautiful, needs me, funny) often yielded better predictions, but, with few exceptions, increments were typically smaller than that of the primary primal. We recommend including these primals in positive psychology interventions and describe three couplings of primals and character strengths that may prove especially fruitful for future research and practice.

Sustainability of E-Collaboration

2011 ◽  
pp. 596-601
Author(s):  
António Dias de Figueiredo
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Group Development ◽  
Virtual Collaboration ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Common ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

In spite of its recognition as a field of research and practice with a lineage of several decades of prolific development (Kock & Nosek, 2005), virtual collaboration is still a domain where mixed results occur and failure crops up without warning (DeSanctis, Poole, Dickson, & Jackson, 1993; Blythin, Hughes, Kristoffersen, Rodden, & Rouncefield, 1997; Kock, 2004; Kock & Nosek, 2005). Even as its theoretical, technical, operational, and conceptual boundaries expand (Kock & Nosek, 2005), we still feel powerless when a promising experience of e-collaboration, which we could swear would last for a long time, suddenly collapses. In this article we discuss some fundamental conditions for sustainable e-collaboration. We start by introducing the concept of value proposal, the common ground of compatible interests required to make collaboration last, and we distill from it what we call the principle of sustainable e-collaboration. We then move to a discussion of the variable levels of collaboration and their relationship to group development, leadership and purpose. Finally, we briefly expound five groups of theories that we view as promising candidates for the future establishment of the theoretical foundations of sustainable e-collaboration. Figure 1 summarizes the key concepts of the article.

scholarly journals Epigenetic Regulations of AhR in the Aspect of Immunomodulation

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (17) ◽  
pp. 6404
Author(s):  
Anna Wajda ◽  
Joanna Łapczuk-Romańska ◽  
Agnieszka Paradowska-Gorycka
Keyword(s):  
Autoimmune Disease ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Disease Manifestation ◽  
Genetic Changes ◽  
Immunological Responses ◽  
Autoimmune Antibodies ◽  
Physiological Processes ◽  
The Common

Environmental factors contribute to autoimmune disease manifestation, and as regarded today, AhR has become an important factor in studies of immunomodulation. Besides immunological aspects, AhR also plays a role in pharmacological, toxicological and many other physiological processes such as adaptive metabolism. In recent years, epigenetic mechanisms have provided new insight into gene regulation and reveal a new contribution to autoimmune disease pathogenesis. DNA methylation, histone modifications, chromatin alterations, microRNA and consequently non-genetic changes in phenotypes connect with environmental factors. Increasing data reveals AhR cross-roads with the most significant in immunology pathways. Although study on epigenetic modulations in autoimmune diseases is still not well understood, therefore future research will help us understand their pathophysiology and help to find new therapeutic strategies. Present literature review sheds the light on the common ground between remodeling chromatin compounds and autoimmune antibodies used in diagnostics. In the proposed review we summarize recent findings that describe epigenetic factors which regulate AhR activity and impact diverse immunological responses and pathological changes.

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