| Abstract: |
The child-centered, play-based curriculum enhances young children's
problem-solving skills and socio-emotional competences. As such, in order to
firmly establish it within the education system and bolster its effectiveness,
guardians and teachers must collaborate to support children's play activities,
and a mutually beneficial learning community for teachers must be built. - To
improve adaptability, education must focus on enhancing students'
problem-solving skills. - In the child-centered, playbased curriculum,
children experience the problemsolving process via selfdirected play with
their teacher's support - Support from teachers should be based on the
children's play experiences in and outside of the classroom. - For the new
curriculum to take hold, a sufficient number of execution examples and
analysis of its effects on children's competences are needed. - Class
critiques, which provide actual examples of the curriculum in operation, were
conducted as a form of teacher training. - The training was designed to
improve teachers' educational beliefs, knowledge, and practices. - The
training improved the teachers' ability to execute the child-centered,
play-based curriculum. - Teachers found it difficult to share the children's
experiences in the classroom with their guardians and to discuss measures on
supporting the children's development. - Teacher training in the form of class
critiques was effective in improving children's cool executive function and
socioemotional competences. - Executive function is a problem-solving skill
and a psychological competence with which individuals combine and apply
accumulated information to fulfill a goal while controling their impulses and
establishing an action plan, putting it into practice, and attempting a
different strategy when the first fails. - Executive function can be divided
into working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility. - Teacher training
enhanced children's inhibition and cognitive flexibility. - Executive function
can serve as an indicator for children's problem behaviors and emotional
control as well as their future experiences e.g. resilience, maintaining a job
and marriage, health, income, and the crime rate. - Teacher training improved
children's extrinsic and intrinsic problem behaviors and socio-emotional
competences e.g. emotional self-control. - The child-centered, playbased
curriculum creates an environment that can foster children's executive
function. - The execution of the curriculum enhances children's executive
function and improves their socioemotional competence either directly or via
the executive function. - For the curriculum to take root and to be more
effective, class critiques should be conducted in greater numbers, and
collaboration is needed between teacher and guardians to support children's
play. |