Author: Marina Bazhydai

Marina, Elena and Didar presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies held in Glasgow this year. Elena and Didar presented several posters on their research from PhD work. Elena and Marina also presented two research studies on infant curiosity in the organised symposium: In the driver’s seat of development.

Marina has been working with the Morecambe Bay Curriculum (MBC) to create school resources highlighting sustainability, nature-based and place-based learning. A news article outlining this work is available here.

The resources are available through free MBC membership – you can view the examples and sign up here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/morecambe-bay-curriculum/resources/

The first phase of the project culminated in a full-day conference on July 5, 2024. Marina participated in the panel discussion: Linking sustainability and place into the curriculum: Panel Discussion between teachers and academics focused on these themes, and led a teacher-focused workshop, entitled: Promoting children’s curiosity, wonder and creativity through engagement with nature – evidence from psychological science and innovative education.

Didar Karadag and Elena Altmann completed their respective PhDs, passing their vivas with flying colours. We wish them exciting new adventures in their new post-doctoral roles!

Our first Registered Report – Stage 2 – led by Didar is now out in Developmental Science.

Karadag, D., Bazhydai, M., & Westermann, G. (2024). Toddlers do not preferentially transmit generalizable information to others. Developmental Science, e13479. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13479

We found that 2-year-olds do not show a preference to share information that is generalisable over specific/non-generalisable with a person who presented themselves as not knowledgeable.

We designed a study where children were shown novel boxes where different buttons led to separate outcomes: one type triggered a generalisable outcome across boxes (e.g., three different tunes in Boxes 1, 2, and 3) and the other type, a non-generalisable outcome across boxes as defined by the status at start-up of the device.

After learning about the functions of the toys, children could encode which buttons were or were not leading to the generalisable outcomes. An adult who was not present during the learning phase then entered the room and asked the child to be taught about these boxes.

Contrary to our expectation, children were at chance with sharing the functions of the boxes, thus, unlike older children from previous literature, they did not show the early preference for sharing generalisable information.

Marina has been awarded a 5-year Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant: “Curiosity Battery: Developing a new toolkit for primary school children”. Working with a Co-I at Stirling University, Dr Lily Fitzgibbon, and a team comprising a postdoc and two PhD researchers, we will develop and validate a multidimensional assessment battery of curiosity in primary-school-age children, and use it in longitudinal studies examining children’s academic achievement and psychological well-being. Stayed tuned for commencement of this exciting work in September 2024!

Elena, Didar, Malcolm and Marina presented the current work in progress at the Lancaster International Conference on Infant and Early Child Development (LCICD), which we have all co-organised as well. We featured our work on curiosity and information transmission in children: the full details are available in the programme here: https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/lcicd/files/2023/08/LCICD2023-Abstract-Booklet-3.pdf

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.