Learning study in pre-school: teachers’ awareness of children's learning and what they actually learn

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe pre-school children's learning during a learning study, and their teachers’ awareness of each child's learning possibilities in relation to what they actually learned. The paper's aims are twofold; first, to focus on how to design learning study in pre-school settings; and second, to study young children's (aged 4-5) learning.

Design/methodology/approach: The data consist of three videotaped interviews with each participating child (n=39), three videotaped interventions and one videotaped interview each with three pre-school teachers.

Findings: The results show: an increased learning outcome in all three groups; there is a discrepancy between what the children actually learned and the teachers’ awareness about the children's possibilities. The teachers’ awareness of the children's learning possibilities differ from what the children actually learned.

Originality/value: Learning study is usually used in school settings, but this paper shows its potential also in pre-school settings. Beside this, the results indicate that there is a risk that if teachers’ expectations are too high or too low, they will affect children's abilities to learn in either a positive or a negative way by not offering the children sufficiently challenging tasks. By the use of learning study the teachers became aware of this discrepancy and were able to reassess their expectations for each child according to their abilities.