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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren

Social and Emotional Learning and Life Mastery in Early Childhood Education and Care

Alternative title: SELMA

Awarded: NOK 20.0 mill.

The SELMA research project aims to develop and test an intervention to support children's social and emotional learning and development in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Few assessments to study children's social and emotional development exist and this will be developed and piloted in the first phase of the project. The framework plan for the kindergarten's content and tasks emphasizes respect, forgiveness, equality, diversity, community, democracy, solidarity, and social competence as central values. Letting children experience joy permeates the framework plan; centers shall contribute to children's well-being, joy, mastery, and self-worth. Children shall be supported in overcoming adversity and dealing with challenges. However, approaches for promoting children's development and experiences in these areas are only weekly described in the framework plan. SELMA researchers and ECEC teachers will collaborate to create working methods to promote children's social and emotional learning and development. Employees in ECEC have different backgrounds and there is a need for easily available resources to strengthen their common competence. A comprehensive online resource bank will be created to contribute to employees' competence. The resource bank will also contain suggestions and examples of play and activities for the children that can contribute to their social and emotional learning and development. The resources that are developed will then be tested in a large RCT-study with approximately 150 kindergartens. The project has many sub-goals, among other things related to implementation work, and the employees' own well-being. Collaborating partners in the project are Sandnes and KANVAS kindergartens. The project is run by researchers at the Center for Learning Environment and the UiS Business School and has a Scientific Advisory Board with highly competent and experienced National and International researchers. The project duration is from 2021 - 2025. Activities in 2021 Researchers and partners have met several times to plan the start-up and further activities in SELMA. We have particularly focused on the development of the online resource bank aiming at making it easily accessible and adapted to the sector. In this regard, a review study has been initiated to map previous work in the area described in the international research literature. Another working group is in the process of obtaining an overview of possible tests for the RCT study in the project. Writing down the formal "Theory of Change" in the project is in progress, and the task of recruitment of ECEC centers for the project has been initiated. Recruitment of candidates for the Ph.D. positions is in progress. Researchers in the project have finalized published several scientific articles related to key topics in SELMA, including implementation work in RCT studies (Størksen et. al, 2021), mapping tools for young children (ten Braak & Størksen, 2021; Idsøe, et al. 2021), intervention work in kindergarten (Plischewski et al., 2021) and the importance of early self-regulation for further learning (ten Braak et al., 2021). We have also worked to revise the Agder RCT study that has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Human Resources (Rege et al., 2021). Participants in the project have been active in disseminating to the sector. A website has been established for the project https://www.uis.no/nb/selma .

Early childhood socio-emotional development and everyday positive emotions are foundational for future health, education, well-being, and adjustment in society. Learned optimism obtained during early childhood can endure and have an impact throughout life. The importance of providing high-quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), is well known. Still, initiatives to improve ECEC often focus heavily on pre-academic learning because these skills are so predictive of future school success. Assessments of subjective well-being/positive emotions and optimism for children as young as five years hardly exist and therefore this topic is hard to study, but what if life-mastery skills such as optimism and happiness are crucial for children’s lives and future transition to school? Raising social and robust children that experience well-being and everyday positive emotions are the main goals in most societies and for most parents. Still, little research exists on everyday positive emotions in ECEC. Positive emotions, coping with adversity, and tackling challenges, belonging to a branch of psychology called positive psychology, are rarely included in research with young children. Positive psychology was introduced during the 1990s yet, with a few exceptions, positive psychology research has not reached ECEC, and new interventions and research are needed. Teacher’s socio-emotional skills and well-being form the basis for children’s socio-emotional learning. Therefore, we will develop and test the effects of a SEL intervention with elements from positive psychology aimed at both ECEC teachers and children. Primary objectives include; 1) To develop and evaluate measures of everyday positive emotions and optimism for young children, 2) to develop a SEL intervention for teachers and children with elements from positive psychology, and 3) to test the effects of the new intervention on teachers and children.

Publications from Cristin

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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren