Starting small: Building preschool teacher knowledge that supports early literacy development

By A. Cunningham, Jamie Zibulsky, Mia D. Callahan. 2009

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A growing body of research is emerging that investigates the teacher knowledge base essential for supporting reading and writing development at the elementary school level. However, even though increasing recognition is given to the pivotal role that preschool teachers play in cultivating children’s early literacy development, considerably fewer studies have examined the knowledge base of these early childhood educators. This paper will discuss the existing research literature and then examine a recent study that investigated the knowledge constructs of 20 preschool teachers. Findings indicate that preschool teachers lack the disciplinary knowledge required to promote early literacy and, in fact, tend to overestimate what they know, creating a potential obstacle for seeking additional knowledge. Recommendations for strengthening professional development programs and developing more robust measures of preschool teacher knowledge are proposed.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1cbf3f8e472ef40d5a6c032d6667422568153976

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Guidelines for Selecting Professional Development for Early Childhood Teachers (2019, background): “Further, several studies find that coursework plus individualized coaching centered around that coursework, results in greater change in teacher practice and child outcomes than coursework alone (Landry et al. 2009; Neuman and Cunningham 2009).”
Early childhood educators' knowledge, beliefs, education, experiences, and children's language- and literacy-learning opportunities: What is the connection? (2016, methodology): “Specifically, for both types of knowledge, Content Knowledge (Cunningham et al., 2009) and Knowledge for Use (Neuman and Cunningham, 2009), educators averaged 65% correct.”
What teachers don't know and why they aren't learning it: addressing the need for content and pedagogy in teacher education (2014, background): “As Cunningham et al. (2009) reported, teachers learn at different rates and often begin their coursework or professional development with inaccurate ideas about how much, and what, they should learn to be effective in the classroom.”