WGBH Educational Foundation

This article starts from two observations about archival description. First, creating finding aids requires significant judgment and interpretation, and is therefore inevitably influenced by the positionalities—the perspectives, personal histories, and social identities—of the archivists. Second, finding aids occasionally call for revision, sometimes to fit a new data standard or reflect an evolving collection, but also to correct errors, reduce bias, and remove harmful language. In light of these observations, this article has two aims. First, it develops and presents a theoretical rationale for recording metadata about finding aids, including revision history and authorship, arguing for transparency about positionality as a response to recognizing the infeasibility of impartiality. Second, it presents the results of a survey of state archivists in the US, who were asked about their descriptive practices and their attitudes regarding disclosing their authorship of finding aids. Results of the survey reveal diverse practices, as well as some hesitation to embrace expressions of positionality in the context of description. The article closes with a discussion of options for conceptualizing metadata about finding aids and the professional role of archivists, concluding with two general recommendations.

This chapter provides an overview of how digital media can be leveraged to support the exploration of developmentally appropriate computational thinking (CT) skills for preschoolers. These skills, named CT Core Ideas in the project team's framework, support children's abilities to tackle problems or goals using systematic, computational strategies. The authors describe a theoretical model that outlines the ways in which CT aligns with preschool math instruction, and how children can apply their CT skills through digital gameplay. This chapter also shares lessons learned from classroom research with teachers and children and describes several game prototypes that children played to practice their CT skills. At the end of the chapter, they provide recommendations for how educators can support young children's CT by integrating hands-on gameplay into classroom instruction.

This chapter summarizes theoretical connections between computational thinking through learning to code, self-regulation, and executive function and discusses why it is important to continue exploring the intersection of executive function, self-regulation, and computational thinking, including the need to revisit the socio-cultural underpinnings of foundational self-regulation, executive function, and school readiness research. As an example, findings from a 2014 study that explored the relationship between self-regulation and computational thinking when learning to code are shared. Research supports the idea of teaching computational thinking skills within an integrated early childhood curriculum to support the development of well-prepared citizens for the 21st century by drawing on the connections between executive function, self-regulation, and computational thinking.

The ubiquity of touchscreen, mobile tablet technology has resulted in a plethora of “apps for learning” yet few leverage the learning sciences as a design driver. This paper describes our approach to integrating the learning sciences with best practices in app design: a design framework that involves researchers and developers in a co-development process to create apps based on research and evidence. Our framework centers around a learning blueprint which is intended to serve as a “boundary object.” This boundary object facilitates a design process that allows the design team to focus on both children’s engagement and learning. Here we describe the challenges that our project team encountered and our approaches to overcome those challenges on the Next Generation Preschool Math (NGPM) project, a development and research effort devoted to creating a supplemental preschool math curriculum supplement with integrated digital apps.