Child Development and Learning

Taught courses

• MSc Education (Child Development and Education)
• PGDip in Early Childhood Education
• DPhil in Education

Examples of  current DPhil projects

• Abdul Karim Ismail: Quantitative Assessment of Student Psychological States using Physiological Measurement Devices
• Haoran Luo: Exploring Mathematics Pedagogical Interactions in Chinese Kindergartens: A Conversation Analytic Approach
• Henry Tsz Fung Lo: Fluctuation and association between affective, contextual, and cognitive construct in real-world classrooms: Multilevel Dynamic structural equation analysis of Ambulatory Assessment Data
• Olivia Lutwak: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Increased School Safety Procedures on Students’ Self-Perceptions and Academic Outcomes
• Siyu Ma: Siblingship, Home Environment, and Child Development across SES groups: A Study of Second-born Children under the Chinese Two-child Policy
• Rahel Warnatsch: The Preschool Home Learning Environment in Families Living with Disadvantages: Parents’ Perspectives on Resources and Challenges
• Zhen Zheng: The role of oral form, written form, and meaning in Chinese children’s learning of English vocabulary

Examples of  completed DPhil projects

• Dominik Bulla: Achievement emotions in Rwanda: an intensive longitudinal study of predictors and correlates of emotions amongst primary students in Rwanda
• Lauren Burton:The spelling of a word does not always parallel with the way it sounds: the importance of teaching children morphological spelling rules
• Yu Chan:Cross-linguistic transfer of phonological awareness in Chinese children receiving English instruction: an intervention study
• Kyle Davison: Academic peer help-seeking and help-giving at Key Stage 2
• Rachel Gardner:Efficacy of a whole class early oral language intervention; impact on language, literacy and educational outcomes
• Haoran Liu:A comparative study of primary school teachers’ identities in state school and private schools in China
• Tiarnach McDermott:An investigation of learning transfer and motivation to transfer from virtual environments in preschool children, and the effects of feedback on these learning characteristics
• Bai Li: Learning to Read the Complex Manchu Writing System: A Mixed Methods Study of Novice Learners in a Chinese University
• Anushay Mazhar: Pakistani Children’s Social-Emotional Skills: Associations to Early Childhood Education Classroom Quality and Academic Skills
• Aneyn O’Grady: Capturing the Interconnected and Interpersonal Nature of Emotion Concepts: Implications for Social-Emotional Learning

Research conducted by this group on the ‘Reasoning First’ programmes have been taken up by more schools in the last year and continue to have an impact through the National Centre for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching (NCETM). The NCETM was a partner for one of the group’s previous EEF grants to assess the effectiveness of the programme Mathematical Reasoning in Year 2; 160 schools participated in this project and used the programme. The NCETM is now using it as a preparation for their Mastery Teaching in Mathematics. This approach is being tested in 50 schools.

Some of our research aims to understand how deaf children learn to read and write and learn mathematics in primary school.

Members of our group work in partnership with Oxfordshire County Council to support Early Years staff in improving practice in their own centres along with practice in nearby settings. The programme centres on the use of observations to improve practice, including the use of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-E (ECERS-E) and the Sustained Shared Thinking and Emotional Well-being Scale (SSTEW).

Research on early childhood education has helped shape policy and practice in the UK and beyond. Major longitudinal studies – Effective Preschool, Primary and Secondary Education Study (EPPSE) 1997-2016) and its follow up Study of Early Education and Development (SEED) – demonstrated the long-term benefits of early education, identified effective pedagogy, and illustrated the power of the home learning environment. Evidence generated has helped shape government initiatives such as the provision of free early childhood education to millions of 2-4 year olds. This has fed into the Department of Education initiative, ‘Hungry Little Minds’ – a suite of freely downloadable resources for parents to stimulate their child’s cognitive and linguistic development at home. Internationally, governments and early education providers in Australia, Hong Kong, Norway and Japan have used the tools and findings from the research to improve the early education provision of tens of thousands of children.