Author: Marina Bazhydai

Marina presented two talks featuring the preliminary results of the project on wonder in education at the 3rd International Conference of Possibility Studies in Dublin, Ireland which focused on the theme Cultivating the Possible: Reimagining Education and Society. The project resulted in successful UK validations of two new instruments. The Wonder Chart is a newly validated (in the Netherlands and in the UK) measure of primary school children’s wonder and the Wonder-full Education Questionnaire assesses primary school teachers’ ability to foster wonder in the classroom. The results from this work are currently being written up for a peer-review publication.

We at the ALL are happy to announce the our study of validating the Wonder-full Education Questionnaire is now completed and we are in the process of analysing the results and writing them up for a peer reviewed publication. In short, this quantitative measure works well (in other words, it has good psychometric properties)!  And thus it can now be used to measure teachers’ propensity to incorporate educational activities that facilitate wonder in primary school children, as well as the school policy that allows for such activities to be incorporated.

Thank you to all the 140 UK KS2 teachers who took part! Our lucky winner of the National Book Voucher draw is Madi Bliss from the Handcross Park School in West Sussex: Congratulations!

The ManyManys is a large-scale international multi-disciplinary collaboration on comparative cognition and behaviour across animal taxa, including humans. Marina is part of the first project looking at reversal learning and cognitive flexibility.

Didar, Elena and Marina presented at the Jean Piaget Society conference in Madrid held on 1-3 June.

Marina and Didar organised and presented at the symposium entitled “Ideas worth spreading: Development and selectivity in children’s teaching”, presenting work from the lab and international colleagues

Marina organised the discussion session entitled “Conceptual and theoretical perspectives on curiosity in development” featuring a panel of international experts on curiosity, and Elena presented her work on infant curiosity.

Marina has been interviewed for the parenting podcast by the Tooled Up education, Get a Grip! Parenting Podcast. This episode focuses on the ALL’s ongoing work on curiosity and wonder.

Listen here! 

Dr Daphne Barker wrote a piece for the Times Education Supplement to feature ALL’s work on wonder in the schools: https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/how-wonder-drives-learning

If you are a teacher in the UK’s KS2, we invite you to take part in our online study featuring a prize draw: https://tinyurl.com/TeacherWonder

Marina was interviewed for the BBC’s Tiny Happy People series to speak about how babies explore the world through what is called mouthing and why parents should embrace this behaviour (with common sense caution): read here

Daphne and Marina ran an engagement event with children from Reception to Year 6 classes at the STEM week held at the Quernmore CofE primary school. Daphne spoke about what it is like to do psychological science, which methods we use in developmental research at the Babylab and Active Learning Lab, and offered interactive activities and lots of opportunities for asking questions and sharing experiences. We thank the school and children for hosting us!

Members of the lab have contributed to two large-scale international collaborations:

A Unified Approach to Demographic Data Collection for Research with Young Children Across Diverse Cultures is available as a pre-print here.
Here, we argue for an added emphasis on collecting detailed and high quality demographic data in developmental research and propose ways to do that.

ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time – pre-print here.
This is Registered Report proposing an investigation of the Hunter-Ames model of infant preferences for visual stimuli of different novelty and complexity.

Elena Altmann and Didar Karadag presented their research at the Budapest CEU conference on cognitive development.
Elena presented her work on infants’ curiosity: Individual Differences in infants’ Exploration Styles within a novel, gaze-contingent Paradigm.
Didar presented on her work with toddlers: Selective teaching in development: preferential information transmission following direct instruction and independent exploration in 2-and 5-year-olds
and older children: Selective teaching: Do children transmit generalizable or specific information to naïve social partners?