Parental cooperation with the kindergarten is the most important way to support preschoolers' academic skills

 

Research into the academic skills of five-year-old children shows that parents' beliefs and cooperation with their kindergarten are more important than the abundance of parental activities at home in supporting the academic skills of five-year-old children.

 

The study, conducted by Anne-Mai Meesak, Doctorate in Educational Sciences, involved more than 500 five-year-old children and 300 parents. The study assessed children's cognitive processes (i.e. attention and perception, working memory, thinking) and learning, language and mathematical skills individually on a tablet using an e-assessment tool for child development (LAHE). At the same time, parents answered a questionnaire about their beliefs, expectations, cooperation with their kindergarten and activities at home.

To verify the suitability of the assessment tool for assessing children's early skills, the children's results were also compared with teachers' assessments of the same areas. The teachers' assessments and the children's actual results were found to be largely similar. The exception was study skills, which may be more difficult for teachers to assess, as they were based on children's own assessments of their own interest, perceived ability and confidence levels.

The results showed that although children's early cognitive, learning, language and mathematical skills are interlinked, they can also be distinguished and assessed separately. Children's academic skills were significantly predicted by their own cognitive processes and learning skills. Although girls performed slightly better in language skills and Russian-speaking children scored slightly higher in study skills, the skills of Estonian five-year-olds were generally quite similar.

 

Parental beliefs and behaviour

The study’s most telling finding concerns parents' beliefs about their children. Parents who perceived their children as having cognitive difficulties engaged in the least amount of activities at home that supported their children’s skills. This means that the children who needed the most support received the least at home. At the same time, the amount of home activities did not depend on the parents’ educational level.

The study also revealed an interesting connection. Although higher parental expectations regarding the skills children need for school were associated with more frequent home activities, neither parental expectations nor home activities were linked to children's actual performance in language and mathematics. Instead, the parents’ active participation in kindergarten activities proved to be important. This supported both the children's academic skills and encouraged parents to contribute more to shared activities with their child at home.

 

What do the results show?

The results suggest that early childhood education in Estonia plays an important role in supporting children's early skills. Most five-year-olds in Estonia attend kindergarten, where learning and educational activities are play-based and follow the national curriculum, which allows children with different home backgrounds to achieve similar academic results. This ensures the equality and quality of early childhood education in Estonia.

From the societal aspect, the research highlights two findings that help ensure a child’s holistic development. Firstly, it is important to support parents in recognising their children's strengths and weaknesses, so that they can better support their children's early learning. Secondly, parents should be actively involved in kindergarten activities. Therefore, the research confirms that a child’s development is best supported by strong cooperation between home and kindergarten.

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DOI

10.60518/etera/143 

Method of Research

Preparing future math teachers to teach data science

 When Eric Weber, professor and chair of mathematics at Iowa State University, talks about data science with future math teachers, he doesn’t begin with code, algorithms or buzzwords.

Instead, he asks them to imagine the scientific method — form a hypothesis, collect data, conduct experiments — running in reverse. 

“In data science, you don’t start with a hypothesis or prediction,” Weber said. “You start with the data that already exists — maybe numbers someone collected years ago, or information gathered for a totally different purpose — and you work backward. You look for patterns, connections or surprises in the data, and those clues help you figure out what questions you should even be asking. So, instead of testing a hypothesis, you’re discovering one.”

This definition is the basis for curriculum Weber and colleagues at Iowa State and the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) have designed to help prepare future math teachers to teach data science in high-school classrooms. Their work reflects a growing national consensus that data science literacy should be part of secondary education.

“Multiple professional societies in mathematics, statistics and mathematics education have released statements in support of teaching data science in high schools,” Weber said. “But while high schools are being encouraged to add data-science courses, the teachers expected to teach them often receive little to no preparation.” 

In a new paper published by Scatterplot, the MAA Journal of Data Science, Weber and his co-authors argue that future math teachers are the educators best positioned to take on this role — but only if their training programs give them the tools to do it.

“Our goal is to help close that gap with the curriculum we’ve created,” Weber said. 

Weber’s co-authors are Heather Gallivan, associate professor of mathematics education at UNI; Lydia Butters, a former math education student at UNI who now teaches at Cedar Falls (Iowa) High School; and Stephen Nathan Mercil, a former mathematics doctoral student at Iowa State who is now an instructor at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.

Teaching data science by starting with what teachers already know

The curriculum, which is a five-week, self-contained module delivered within coursework taken by pre-service math teachers at Iowa State and UNI, focuses on the relationship between math and data science.

“We want to show pre-service math teachers that data science isn’t a separate universe from the math they already study,” Weber said. “It’s built on it.”

Many data-science ideas, including modeling, optimization and visualization, grow directly out of algebra, geometry and calculus, so instead of focusing on coding or software, the curriculum module uses familiar mathematical structures to introduce new concepts, Weber said.

A regression line becomes a model. 

A classification problem becomes a geometry puzzle. 

An optimization routine becomes a function‑minimizing exercise.

Weber said this strategy helps pre-service teachers get past the intimidation factor.

“If we can break down the initial barrier of, ‘I don’t know what data science is,’ then their ability to make that transition becomes pretty quick,” he said.

A project shaped by timing and a growing need

The idea for this project began in 2019, when Weber and Mercil first piloted the curriculum at Iowa State. The first full run happened in spring 2020, just as the pandemic forced classes online, Weber said.

The project expanded after Weber teamed up with Gallivan, whose background in statistics helped merge the two universities’ approaches. Funding from the Iowa Space Grant Consortium allowed the team to refine the lessons and offer the curriculum at both campuses starting in 2023.

“The module has been taught every spring at Iowa State and UNI since then, and each year, we add improvements based on student feedback and classroom experience,” said Weber, who is also a member of a committee assembled by the Iowa Department of Education to help write data science learning standards for the state.

To help future teachers see how data science works in practice, the curriculum uses a mix of synthetic and real‑world datasets.

One set simulates animal‑tracking data — timestamps, locations and headings — to give students a chance to explore visualization, dimensionality reduction and prediction. Another uses housing data collected by local high‑school students, allowing pre‑service teachers to practice multiple regression and think about how they might guide their own students through similar projects.

These examples, Weber and team said, help teachers understand how data‑science questions emerge from the data itself — and not from a prewritten hypothesis.

Preparing teachers for an AI-driven world

Weber said a broader goal of the project is to prepare teachers for classrooms where artificial intelligence and automated decision‑making are already part of students’ daily lives, and to help future teachers understand the relationship between AI and data science (“they’re closely related,” Weber said, “but they aren’t the same thing.”).

“Data science is the bigger field,” Weber said. “It’s about using math, statistics and computer tools to make sense of data and find patterns.”

Artificial intelligence, he explained, is about creating systems that can do tasks that usually require human thinking. AI systems learn from data, so they depend heavily on the work data science does.

The link between data science and AI comes from machine learning, a part of AI that learns patterns directly from data.

“Machine learning uses the same math and statistics that data science uses,” Weber said. “Simply put, data science helps us understand what the data is saying, and AI uses that understanding to make decisions or take action.”

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects data science jobs will grow 34 percent between 2024 and 2034, a rate that is significantly faster than the average for all occupations.

“Artificial intelligence is powerful, but we'll still need data scientists — humans in the loop,” Weber said. “AI systems don’t ‘think’ the way humans do; they learn patterns from large amounts of data and make predictions based on probability. Without someone who understands how that data was collected, what it represents and where it might be misleading, the results can be wrong or even harmful. Data scientists can interpret and contextualize the output of those systems.”

Early results show promise

The researchers’ curriculum has now run for four consecutive spring semesters at Iowa State and UNI, Weber said, adding that one former student is already teaching data science at a high school. 

Additionally, a pre- and post-assessment administered during the first implementation showed measurable gains in students’ understanding of data science concepts, suggesting the approach is helping future teachers build both confidence and competence.

Weber said these early signs reinforce the need for continued investment in teacher preparation.

“We hope to obtain additional funding that will help us expand our work and support teachers who are already working in the field with in-service programming and classes that could earn teaching licensure renewal credits,” Weber said.

Read the paper:  Weber, E., Gallivan, H., Butters, L., & Nathan Mercil, S. “Leveraging Mathematical Knowledge to Prepare Future Math Teachers to Teach Data Science,” Scatterplot, 3(1). Published online April 2026.

Relationship of social media content & mental health from the perspective of Latino youth

 A new book titled SocialsVoice shines a light on the relationship between social media content and mental health from the perspective of Latino youth—a group that engages with social media across multiple languages and cultural perspectives. Through concrete examples, the book presents a complex portrait of their experiences online, including both the mental health risks posed by certain content and the presence of supportive, anti-stigmatizing voices.

The book project was led by Melissa DuPont-Reyes, assistant professor of epidemiology and sociomedical sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, working in partnership with research collaborators and participants. The book draws on findings from a research study focused on 41 participating Latino youths ages 13 to 24, and 28 of their parents, all recruited from community-based organizations across the United States. Unlike previous research that relied on surveys or app data, the book is based on participatory research. Youth didn’t just answer survey questions; they also shared social media clips they encountered and analyzed how those clips helped or harmed their mental health. (Download a copy of the book here.)

Through dozens of richly illustrated examples and reflections throughout the book, youth identify rampant stigmatizing content, including posts claiming mental illness isn’t “real,” minimizing depression, reinforcing stereotypes, and promoting toxic masculinity. At the same time, they point to evidence of a powerful, youth-led anti-stigma movement, featuring mental health education, symptom management, suicide awareness, and self-care strategies. The book also shows how Latino youth use social media to discuss stigma and social issues occurring in real life, like racism, immigration, vaccine hesitancy, school shootings, poverty, sexual assault, and LGBTQIA+ support.

“We hope that this book helps elevate youth voices to inform policies, practices, and programs concerning social media. Too often, youth voices are misunderstood or ignored altogether. The SocialsVoice project also exemplifies how participatory research approaches are a powerful, community-generated response to concerns about the safety and utility of social media,” says DuPont-Reyes.

Example of a Negative Social Media Post

A 22-year-old female study participant reacts to a video clip featuring a man speaking to the camera about depression who says, “That’s some made-up sh*it.”:
“In this clip, he states that depression isn’t real. It is self-preservation, but only being able to self-preserve and survive day after day instead of living makes a depressed person.”

Example of a Positive Social Media Post

A 17-year-old male participant reacts to a TikTok video of a woman speaking about how she gives herself time to process and act on her feelings:

“This clip can educate others on how important it is to allow ourselves time to deal with our problems and not just set them to the side or ignore them.”

“Mindfulness Behind the Screen”

The book also highlights how young people are learning to set boundaries, curate positive content, and use “mindfulness behind the screen.” In the words of one 16-year-old female participant: “Social media is both good and bad, because you could be randomly using it and a bad video pops up, and then it makes your mental health worse, and then it keeps happening. However, you could also use social media to look for better videos and be like ‘Oh, okay, it’s actually not as toxic as initially shown’ because then you’re actively making changes to your algorithm and making sure that it’s better for your mental health.”

About the SocialsVoice Study

SocialsVoice began with youth participants defining what they considered to be positive and negative mental health content. Then, the youth were randomly assigned to groups of either the positive or negative mental health–themed content and invited to share social media clips depicting their assigned theme. Throughout seven video-chat sessions, the youth discussed their thematic social media clips in their groups. The study concluded with youth co-creating their own videos about their research findings that their peers and parents would find relevant and useful. Youth and parent participants were invited to watch the co-created videos together during a virtual film screening event. Links to the videos are available in the book.

Performance of students with autism in interaction with the NAO robot

 This paper investigates NAO robot’s role in supporting autistic students in real classroom settings. Most prior research focuses on one-on-one intervention, lacking group-based evidence. The study uses a within-subject design with six autism spectrum disorder (ASD) students, comparing robot-assisted and regular classrooms across attention, communication, interaction, and emotion. 

Statistical analyses reveal significant enhancements in attention duration, communication frequency, interaction scores, and positive emotions, with reduced negative behaviors. NAO’s compact design and predictable interaction reduce intimidation and boost sustained engagement. 

Findings validate the feasibility of robot-integrated teaching for ASD, providing a basis for long-term curriculum design. 

Limitations include small sample size; future research will adopt larger samples and longitudinal tracking.

The work entitled “Classroom Performance of Students with Autism in Interaction with the NAO Robot” was published on Frontiers of Digital Education (published on April 25, 2026).

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Journal

Frontiers of Digital Education

DOI

10.1007/s44366-026-0083-1 

Alignment between ChatGPT-4o and human grading

 

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for grading written responses, yet large-scale benchmarks against human expert evaluation remain scarce, especially across languages with different resource levels. This study evaluates ChatGPT-4o using a reranked retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework to grade Finland’s national high-stakes matriculation examination from 1,016 students’ open-ended responses. 

This study examines GPT-4o’s alignment with official grades, recognition of grading-relevant keywords, and the effect of translating responses from a low-resource language (Finnish) into a high-resource language (English). Using descriptive statistics and correlation analyses, results show that GPT-4o’s grades on a 0–15 scale closely matched human evaluations: 75% of scores were within ±2 points of official grades, with only 3% severe outliers. 

Translating responses into English improved alignment to 85%. While the model generally identified relevant keywords effectively, occasional misinterpretations of contextual usage reduced grading reliability in a few cases. 

Overall, the findings demonstrate both the promise and current limitations of LLM-based assessment. There is a substantial potential to use LLMs as a supplementary grading tools, particularly in high-resource languages, but they do not yet match the consistency or interpretative depth of human expert evaluators. The study underlines the need for human oversight, rigorous validation, and careful consideration of language effects when deploying LLMs in high-stakes educational assessment.

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Journal

Frontiers of Digital Education

DOI

10.1007/s44366-026-0091-1 

Teachers’ emotions can make or break student learning

 

Joy sparks better learning, while anger shuts students down, study says

Teachers’ emotions in the classroom play a critical role in how students learn, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.  

When teachers experience enjoyment, they deliver higher-quality instruction that boosts students’ confidence in their abilities, interest and academic performance, while teacher anger is linked to poorer teaching and worse student outcomes. 

“We decided to conduct this research because teaching is not only an intellectual activity but also an emotional one,” said lead author Marina Elena Pfeifer, PhD, of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. “We wanted to understand this full chain of events connecting how a teacher feels to how a student performs.” 

The study, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, analyzed data from 679 mathematics teachers and more than 17,500 students across eight countries: Chile, China, Colombia, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Spain and the United Kingdom. During the study, students studied the same math lesson, which allowed researchers to fairly compare classrooms across different countries. 

Teachers reported their levels of enjoyment and anger, while students rated their teachers’ teaching quality, reported their own confidence and interest in the subject and completed a performance test. Researchers focused on three key aspects of teaching quality: classroom management, supportive teacher-student relationships and cognitive activation, which involves encouraging students to think critically. 

“We hypothesized that a teacher’s emotions act as a domino effect in the classroom, linking to student outcomes indirectly through the quality of their instruction,” Pfeifer said. 

The findings supported that hypothesis. Teachers who reported greater enjoyment were more likely to manage classrooms effectively, build supportive relationships with students and use cognitively engaging teaching strategies. These teaching practices, in turn, were associated with higher student confidence in their abilities, greater interest in learning and improved test performance. In contrast, teachers who reported more anger showed lower levels of teaching quality across all three areas and were associated with less favorable student outcomes. 

“In one sense, the findings were not entirely surprising because theory and previous smaller-scale studies had suggested that teacher emotions matter for teaching and learning,” Pfeifer said. “What was especially striking, however, was that these findings could now be shown on a large scale, with a highly culturally diverse teacher sample.” 

The researchers also identified a counterintuitive finding: More supportive teacher-student relationships were sometimes linked to lower student performance. Pfeifer suggested this may reflect teachers providing more emotional support when students are struggling academically. 

“The most fascinating part for me was the cross-cultural similarity of our findings,” Pfeifer said. “Despite considerable cultural, economic and linguistic differences, the mechanisms by which a teacher’s emotions shape teaching quality and student outcomes remained remarkably similar across the globe.” 

The findings highlight the importance of supporting teachers’ emotional well-being as part of improving education systems. 

“Our study shows that a teacher’s emotions are not merely a byproduct of the educational process, but an active contributor to it,” Pfeifer said. “The major real-world implication is that supporting a teacher’s emotional well-being is not just a ‘nice-to-have’—it is critical to student success.” 

The researchers suggest that schools and policymakers should prioritize reducing teacher stress and providing tools such as mindfulness-based interventions to help educators regulate their emotions. 

“Our findings suggest that teachers can easily get caught in powerful, self-feeding emotional-behavioral cycles,” Pfeifer said. “An angry teacher might struggle to manage the class effectively, leading to poor student performance, which in turn makes the teacher feel even more frustrated and unsuccessful—a vicious cycle. Conversely, a joyful teacher creates a virtuous cycle in which effective teaching leads to student success, which makes the teacher even happier and prouder of their work.” 

Article: “Linking Teacher Emotions, Teaching Quality Indicators, and Student Outcomes in Mathematics: Results from OECD’s Global Teaching InSights Study,” by Marina Elena Pfeifer, PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Oliver Lüdtke, PhD, Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education; Uta Klusmann, PhD, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; and Anne C. Frenzel, PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Journal of Educational Psychology, published online June 1, 2026. 

National biology learning objectives/assessment questions overlook connection to society

Is it a doctor's job to get the best outcomes for their patients or to tell the truth? What happens when these two things are not aligned? These are questions that students have to wrangle with in Introductory Biology. The goal, says Elli Theobald, UW assistant professor of biology, is to have students experience a more nuanced side of biology. There is not always one right answer, and issues of power and relationships often come into play.

Theobald aims to connect the biology concepts the students learn in class to real-world issues, something she hopes will help both retain students in the biology major at the UW and help non-majors in the class with their future careers.

Just how common is it for biology curricula to include real-world examples? One way to answer this question is to look at educational resources for biology instructors.

In a recent paper published in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research, Theobald and her team examined almost 3,000 science guidelines and assessment questions from 16 sources — including MCAT practice questions and questions from the Washington Comprehensive Assessment of Science and AP biology tests — for any connections to society. Of the approximately 200 elements — about 7% — that had real-world implications, many discussed ethics and public health issues.

UW News spoke with Theobald; lead author Carly Busch, UW postdoctoral fellow in biology; and co-author Madison Meuler, UW doctoral student in biology, to find out more about these results and what they mean for biology education today.

Why do you think so few learning objectives and assessment questions were connected to real-world examples?

Carly Busch: One reason is probably that there's a perception that real-world connections are not a part of the primary purpose of the course, that they only belong as an addendum or an aside.

This perception makes sense in some ways, given how departments and institutions have conceptualized biology and what biology undergraduate students expect to get out of a biology degree. But the lack of these connections to society was also remarkable, because I think they play a really important role in developing undergraduate students holistically and broadly as they continue on in their science careers. Real-world examples can support students' interest in science and help them develop their scientific identity.

Madison Meuler: I think there is also a belief of, "Oh well, this is an intro biology class. If this person is going to be a scientist, they'll get training in the societal stuff later." But I think there's value in having this type of information even in intro courses.

Students in these courses may or may not go on to major in biology, and may or may not pursue a career in STEM. But even if this is their only science course in college, what could they take away from it that can help them be an informed citizen in the world?

Science plays a huge role in politics and in a lot of decisions that affect people's day-to-day lives. It's a missed opportunity if you're not making those connections in the classroom. We want students, regardless of their future careers, to at least walk away being equipped with some skills to critically analyze the role that science is playing in society.

You found that roughly half of the questions that did mention society only vaguely referenced real-world scenarios. Can you give examples of implicit versus explicit mentions?

CB: So the most vague mention was from the American Association of Immunologists' recommendations for an undergraduate immunology course. This is one of the advanced subtopics that they list: the implications of Emil Von Behring's discovery of diphtheria antitoxin. We coded it as a vague mention because some of those implications could be related to society, not only focused on scientific experiments.

An example of explicit incorporation is from the bioinformatics core competencies. It asks students to explain the implications, good and bad, of being able to walk into a doctor's office and have your genome sequenced and analyzed, or of being able to obtain genetic information from direct-to-consumer testing services. There we have a very clear example of students being asked to think about how the science concept fits in with society.

Do you think that connecting science to society can help retain students in science?

CB: We haven't tested this yet, but based on prior research, there is reason to believe that incorporating these connections is going to help students be more engaged in what they're learning in class. Engagement is closely tied to students' performance outcomes, which often make or break their decision to persist in a major.

There is also a theory that helping students apply what they're learning in the classroom to things happening in their lives and in their communities really sets them up to be lifelong learners and engaged citizens.

This is something I am excited to study in the future — to understand how making these connections expands students' perceptions of what science is and who does science. The types of research questions that most scientists ask are on topics they personally are interested in. Maybe they study wildflowers in Washington because they love hiking, and they've always been struck by how beautiful the flowers are. That's the beauty of being an academic researcher: You get to explore all of the different things that you're curious about.

MM: Connecting content to real-world experiences could also increase retention by helping students feel a sense of belonging in the classroom. You're far less likely to persist in a class if you feel like you don't belong in that physical space, right? The course content definitely plays a role in that.

I think that making these connections between content and societal issues could help students start thinking things like, "Oh, this is a thing I care about, how could I design a study that could provide evidence to help inform a policy decision?"

Elli Theobald: Students have said to me, "I don't want to be a scientist because I want to help people." And that's a problem. If we're teaching science in a way that makes it feel like it isn't helping people, then we're doing something wrong. It's just such a huge disservice to biology because we'll lose so many amazing and capable students who could push our field forward.

This study looked at biology education resources. Do you know if biology instructors are already incorporating more real-world connections in their courses?

CB: If instructors aren't getting support but they're still making these connections in the classroom, it's because they are putting that onus on themselves and choosing to add it. I applaud all instructors who are making these connections, and I fully expect that more connections are being made than what we have found in textbooks and in these resources. We are currently collecting actual course materials from intro bio courses to see where instructors are making these connections.

But I also think that it would be such a valuable resource for instructors to have more support in making those connections. Here's where I think really bolstering the amount of resources for instructors could provide more scaffolding for instructors to be able to provide a variety of connections, or to even recognize opportunities to make these connections in the course objectives. One of my hopes for this work is that it helps to provide motivation for those sorts of materials.