Natalia KucirkovaUniversity of Stavanger (UiS) · Department of Early Childhood
Natalia Kucirkova
MRes; PhD
Co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly
About
183
Publications
56,194
Reads
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2,173
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I'm researching personalisation, digital literacy and early years.
Publications
Publications (183)
This study investigates the effects of a story-making app called Our Story and a selection of other educational apps on the learning engagement of forty-one Spanish 4–5-year-olds. Children were observed interacting in small groups with the story-making app and this was compared to their engagement with a selection of construction and drawing apps....
Children's interactive e-books are novel literacy tools with interactive and multimodal representations of story contents and increased customizable features. The learning opportunities represented by these new affordances demand a thorough consideration of children's engagement, including the contextual and socio-cultural factors which influence t...
This paper is concerned with a so far little explored situational context: sharing books which have been personalised for individual children in a pre-school. Thirty-five children (mean age 36.94 months) were read a book with a personalised and non-personalised part. Their spontaneous verbal responses were video recorded and later transcribed. The...
This paper offers a new characterisation of young children’s (2–8 years) reading for pleasure (RfP) with digital books. This characterisation is rooted in a re-contextualisation of Anna Craft’s conceptualisation of twenty-first century childhoods in Creativity and education futures (Stoke on Trent, Trentham, 2011) and a review of the literature con...
Sixty-five parent–infant dyads were observed reading an unfamiliar book at home. Parents’ use of language-stimulating and emotionally rich reading styles was measured via a specially developed Book Sharing Scale for Infants. Aspects of child temperament were assessed by the Infant Characteristics Questionnaire [Bates, J. E., Freeland, C. A. B., & L...
Much of the debate about academic collaboration with digital companies (see Livingstone, Orben & Odgers, 2022) has surrounded commercial use of data and children's mental health. The debate has also spilled into the educational value of technologies and academic collaboration with companies to improve their learning design. Given the close relation...
Converging global trends (digitization, globalization, datafication) have influenced all aspects of children’s literacies, including children’s picturebooks. The recent turn towards embodied, affective and sensory literacies, stimulated our interest in
multisensory picturebooks that engage all children’s senses, including the sense of smell (olfact...
Advancing learners’ agency is a key educational goal. The advent of personalized EdTech, which automatically tailor learning environments to individual learners, gives renewed relevance to the topic. EdTech researchers and practitioners are confronted with the same basic question: What is the right amount of agency to give to learners during their...
Abstract
Purpose
The study investigated the relationships between spatial, multisensorial, and structural factors in family reading routines.
Materials
1001 survey responses and 926 open-ended answers of parents of 3- to 6-year-olds living in Norway, were analysed.
Results
Parents who reported having a reading routine with their child valued more...
For young immigrant women like me, the pressures of early career research are even greater than for most. But it doesn’t have to be that way. For young immigrant women like me, the pressures of early career research are even greater than for most. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Natalia Kucirkova Natalia Kucirkova
Despite the international focus on validation and success indicators of academic work across disciplines, examples of accomplished educational psychologists and their personal stories have been limited in the literature. Prinz et al. (2021) interviewed Five Highly Successful Female Educational Psychologists and offered a content analysis of their s...
Introduction: This qualitative study explores how Early Childhood Education
and Care (ECEC) professionals’ perceptions of gains and challenges using the
Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS, Pre-K and Toddler) within the
social pedagogical tradition in Norwegian ECEC.
Methods: Focus group interviews (n = 22), group interviews (n = 4), and in-...
This paper develops a critical perspective on the use of conversational agents (CAs) with children at home. Drawing on interviews with eleven parents of pre-school children living in Norway, we illustrate the ways in which parents resisted the values epitomised by CAs. We problematise CAs’ attributes in light of parents’ ontological perceptions of...
This study reports whether a personalized book giveaway intervention boosts both parents’ perception about their 33-month-old (52% female) children's interest in books and reading (through a children's reading interest scale, and report of the child's favorite book), as well as child and adult engagement during shared reading. 198 Chilean families,...
This guide lays out some principles for EdTech
producers and developers who want to embed
scientific principles into their design, implementation
and scale-up.The evidence principles are presented in a
four-part framework that can be used to make sense
of the need and proven approaches to efficacy and effectiveness. Best approaches combine several...
Parents’ attitudes are an important indicator of whether and how parents engage in shared book reading (SBR) at home. This study analysed Norwegian parents’ attitudes towards reading books with their children aged between 1–4.5 years. Thematic analysis of data from 24 interviews revealed two main themes in parents’ accounts: agency (the child’s ind...
Sensory reading refers to reading that engages all six of the human senses – vison, hearing, touch, gustation, olfaction and proprioception. The author proposes that increased attention be paid to the three ‘hidden’ senses of gustation, olfaction and proprioception to advance innovative reading studies. She articulates the problematic of visually d...
At this historical moment of post-pandemic transition, recovery and reckoning, how can we, as literacy researchers, together with teachers and practitioners, international, nuanced and integrated understandings that adequately respond to the challenges and opportunities of the current context? This Special Issue takes a reflective and critical stan...
The significance of learning to think critically from a young age is well documented. Early childhood educators play an essential role in children’s critical skills development. Therefore, it is crucial to understand their perceptions of this concept. This qualitative study explored Norwegian early childhood educators’ perceptions of critical think...
This visual essay investigated how material objects frame and represent our self and identity, specifically focusing on curating different parts of identity through objects on bookshelves in online spaces. For the purpose of this study, a mixed method methodology was adopted where data was collected through semi-structured interviews and visual ana...
This qualitative study explored Norwegian ECEC professionals’ perceptions and reflections concerning the use of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Pre-K and Toddler for professional development. Focus group interviews (n = 22), group interviews (n = 4), and in-depth interviews (n = 3) were conducted online. Conventional content analysi...
This study builds on child-centred early education models that emphasise active listening to children's voices and follow participatory research methods to accommodate children's expressions. We used the cultural probes method with eleven Norwegian 4-5-year-olds to elicit children's storytelling and multisensory engagement. The children were encour...
Litteratur er en mulig skattkiste for barn og voksne. Personaliserte bøker, som er bøker unikt utformet for enkeltbarn, er relativt nytt i Norge, og er gjort til lite gjenstand for forskning. I denne studien analyserer vi foreldrenes opplevelser og medierte barneperspektiver på høytlesing av personaliserte bøker for førskolebarn. Datagrunnlaget er...
Gender equality through the empowerment, representation, and provision of equal oppor- tunities for all, regardless of gender, is increasingly recognised as a driver of social outcomes and a fundamental human right. This study explores the longitudinal (2006–2018) relationship between gender equality, human development, and education results as mea...
Part of effective Early Childhood Education and Care is to support children’s awareness of hazards and management of possible injuries during risky play. This study evaluated the attitudes of Norwegian kindergarten teachers towards ‘Henry first aid training’ and its impact on 3-6-year olds’ understanding of first aid. 588 kindergarten employees com...
Smart technologies offer personalized experiences, such as the possibility for children to record their voice, add their own pictures or drawings to digital stories, customize their avatars or adjust the display settings to their needs. Such personalized technologies are available for young children worldwide but little is known about what these in...
Advances in technology have increased the opportunities for designers to personalise instruction based on student actions. We conducted semi‐structured interviews with an international sample of educational professionals including researchers, teachers and designers, and reviewed interdisciplinary literature on personalisation to propose a framewor...
This meta-analysis examines the inconsistent findings across experimental studies that compared children’s learning outcomes with digital and paper books. We quantitatively reviewed 39 studies reported in 30 articles (n = 1,812 children) and compared children’s story comprehension and vocabulary learning in relation to medium (reading on paper vers...
We examined parent-child shared reading of Maltese and English e-books in four bilingual families. Analysis of the participant videos, questionnaires and semi-structured interview data revealed positive engagement of the participating families, substantiated with three main themes from the participants’ interview accounts: balanced use of e-books a...
Numerous studies have documented the benefits of parent-child shared reading of print books, but few studies have examined parent-child reading behaviours with digital personalized books. This lab-based study examined the child language outcomes following shared reading of a personalized digital book by twenty-six British mothers and their 3- to 4-...
We summarize outcomes from KidRec 2020, the 4 th edition of the workshop on International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems; which this year was co-located with the ACM Interaction Design and Children conference. In addition to lessons learned from the keynote address by Professor Marcia...
Storytelling at home is typically an oral practice that supports parents and children to make sense of their family identity. Parents play a key role in crafting the story plot and facilitating the child’s participation in the storytelling process. Yet in the context of digital technology, interaction design researchers have tended to focus on chil...
This conceptual paper contributes towards our understanding of the underlying mechanisms in children’s understanding of self and the other with media. We synthesise diverse bodies of literature, concerned with children’s reading with digital and traditional (print) books, to explicate the parameters that may, in part, explain positive learning outc...
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been experienced differently in and within individual countries and thus has had a different impact on the individual researchers in the child-computer interaction studies. There were several challenges that our research group experienced during the pandemic period, with a rapid transition to digital working...
This conceptual article discusses the role of digital literacies in personalized books, in relation to children’s developing sense of self, and in terms of assessing the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI). Personalized books contain children’s data, such as their name, gender or image, and they can be created by readers or automatical...
What does it mean to become a reader? What are the challenges and opportunities of engaging children in reading for pleasure in the 21st century? This book explores the ways in which reading for pleasure is changing in the era of globalisation, multiculturalism and datafication. Raising the next generation of engaged readers requires knowledge of t...
In light of growing evidence that many parents are deeply concerned about their young children’s increasing technology use, in this paper we report on aspects of a study funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, where we sought to understand parents’ views on children’s digital book reading. We introduced seven families to four award-w...
Stakeholders in educational systems worldwide are increasingly recognizing the need to cater for linguistically diverse students. Adopting effective teaching practices for multilingual students has therefore become a priority in many countries (e.g. Norway: Mossige et al., 2016). With the purpose of contributing evidence-based resources, several sy...
https://osf.io/59hta/
Young students must become proficient in the new literacies of 21st‐century technologies to be considered literate. This department explores how literacy educators can integrate information and communication technologies into the curriculum.
Given the significant potential of shared book reading to promote children's learning, the design of e-books has focused on maximising this learning experience. However, recent studies have begun to show that shared reading is a broader opportunity for the family to spend quality time together. Our study aims to explore this perspective further, fo...
Given the significant potential of shared book reading to
promote children’s learning, the design of e-books has
focused on maximising this learning experience. However,
recent studies have begun to show that shared reading is a
broader opportunity for the family to spend quality time
together. Our study aims to explore this perspective further,
fo...
Participatory literacies are new ways of experiencing narratives and of “interpreting, making, sharing and belonging in increasingly globally and digitally mediated cultures” (Wohlwend 2017a: 62). This paper discusses the material features of children’s digital books and the extent to which they support participatory literacies. The material featur...
This short review discusses the outcomes of the 3 rd Workshop of the International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec 2019) , co-located with the 2019 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, which took place June 12-15 in Boise, Idaho, USA. The goal for the workshop w...
https://www.igi-global.com/book/mobile-learning-applications-early-childhood/233147
FREE PDF
https://www.igi-global.com/pdf.aspx?tid=242565&ptid=233147&ctid=15&t=Foreword&isxn=9781799814863
The creation and curation processes with digital media are a new literacy practice that has the potential to enhance learning, especially if it validates children's choices and expands their identities as readers and writers. In this chapter, we discuss the curation process in light of contemporary theories and research with British pre-and primary...
Digital books, such as e-books, story apps, picture book apps and interactive stories, are narratives presented on touchscreens with multimedia and interactive features. Accumulating evidence suggests that early reading of print versus digital books is associated with different parent-child engagement patterns and children’s outcomes. Parents’ verb...
In alignment with contemporary theoretical models of reading on screen, this review suggests avenues for future multi-method research by drawing on psychological as well as socio-cultural aspects of reading. Experimental and meta-analytical studies can help develop a more refined understanding of the added value of specific new features in digital...
Today's children spend considerable time online, searching and receiving information from various websites and apps. While searching for information, e.g. for school or hobbies, children use search systems to locate resources and receive site recommendations that might be useful for them. The call for good, reliable, child-friendly systems has been...
The importance of children’s agency in the use of technologies is well-established but it continues to be challenged with applications that automatically personalize children’s content. This paper integrates educational theory of personalization with the design principles and empirical work of a story-making app called Our Story, which places a chi...
This article critically reviews the personalization logic embedded in reading recommendation systems developed for 2-to 11-year-old children and its (dis)alignment with Papert's constructionist and socio-constructionist theories of learning. It is argued that the current design fails to incorporate the computer culture that Papert envisioned for ch...
This is a book review of Maryanne Wolf's book, full text freely available from the journal:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17482798.2019.1574280
This conceptual paper proposes a framework for understanding the developmental mechanisms and literary characteristics that bind children’s storybooks with empathy. The article begins with a taxonomy of empathy composed of three key continuous dimensions: cognitive/emotional empathy, empathy for in-group and out-group members and empathy with posit...
Writing is part and parcel of children's active meaning‐making on and with screens, but it has been relatively neglected in the literature focused on children's digital literacies. This study synthesises existing empirical evidence focused on young children's (aged between 2 and 8 years) writing on screen and identifies the relationships between do...
We discuss the outcomes of the 2nd Workshop of the International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender Systems (KidRec 2018), co-located with the 2018 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, which took place June 19-22 in Trondheim, Norway. The goal for this workshop was to explore research and industry efforts...
This review integrates literature on cross-disciplinary quantitative and qualitative studies related to children’s reading on screen published between January 2016 and September 2017, with a focus on the researchers’ epistemological perspectives on knowledge and learning. Johri’s (2011) framework of socio-material assemblages, which synthesises epi...
We discuss the outcomes of the 2 nd Workshop of the International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender Systems (KidRec 2018), co-located with the 2018 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, which took place June 19-22 in Trondheim, Norway. The goal for this workshop was to explore research and industry efforts...
Participatory literacies are new ways of experiencing narratives and of “interpreting, making, sharing and belonging in increasingly globally and digitally mediated cultures” (Wohlwend 2017a: 62). This paper discusses the material features of children’s digital books and the extent to which they support participatory literacies. The material featur...
How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books outlines effective ways of using digital books in early years and primary classrooms, and specifies the educational potential of using digital books and apps in physical spaces and virtual communities. With a particular focus on apps and personalised reading, Natalia Kucirkova combines theory...
A comprehensive understanding of children’s motivation to read e-books requires a multifaceted and contextualized conceptualization of children’s agency. In this study, agency was operationalized as a set of behaviour indicators of children’s control (behavioural agency), adults’ perceptions of reader identities afforded by the content and format o...
Personalised learning, having seen both surges and declines in popularity over the past few decades, is once again enjoying a resurgence. Examples include digital resources tailored to a particular learner’s needs, or individual feedback on a student’s assessed work. In addition, personalised technology-enhanced learning (TEL) now seems to be attra...
This chapter explores children’s agency in using mobile technologies at home and in school. Supporting children’s agency has been offered as a rationale for adopting personalised education worldwide. Children’s agency is also drawn upon as a justification for children’s use of personal mobile devices. This chapter considers children’s agency in lig...
This investigation concerns two questions: i). is simple educational programming with children, compared to working on mathematical tasks, more effective in increasing scores in mathematical abilities, spatial awareness and working memory? ii), is educational programming on a digital device, compared to similar paper and pencil programming activiti...
Questions
Questions (3)
Hello all, I am working on a meta-analysis with Professor Adriana Bus and we are looking for experimental studies that compare children's reading of print versus digital books. We have a good database already but may have missed some studies so your help would be very much appreciated. Please email any suggestions to natalia.kucirkova@uis.no. Many thanks in anticipation!
Natalia
We are looking for recently published studies (between 2010-2017) on children's writing with touchscreens and mobile technologies. Writing is interpreted broadly and includes children's mark-making and story-making. Many thanks, in advance, for sharing your or your colleagues' research by emailing or posting a link here.
Natalia
Could colleagues please recommend children's (2-8 year olds) apps (or digital books) that allow for recording voice, inserting user's own pictures or videos? Many thanks in advance.
Projects
Projects (13)
The SELMA research project aims to develop and test an intervention to support children's social and emotional learning and development in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Few assessments to study children's social and emotional development exist and this will be developed and piloted in the first phase of the project.
The framework plan for the kindergarten's content and tasks emphasizes respect, forgiveness, equality, diversity, community, democracy, solidarity, and social competence as central values. Letting children experience joy permeates the framework plan; centers shall contribute to children's well-being, joy, mastery, and self-worth. Children shall be supported in overcoming adversity and dealing with challenges. However, approaches for promoting children's development and experiences in these areas are only weekly described in the framework plan.
SELMA researchers and ECEC teachers will collaborate to create working methods to promote children's social and emotional learning and development. Employees in ECEC have different backgrounds and there is a need for easily available resources to strengthen their common competence. A comprehensive online resource bank will be created to contribute to employees' competence. The resource bank will also contain suggestions and examples of play and activities for the children that can contribute to their social and emotional learning and development. The resources that are developed will then be tested in a large RCT-study with approximately 150 kindergartens. The project has many sub-goals, among other things related to implementation work, and the employees' own well-being.
Collaborating partners in the project are Sandnes and KANVAS kindergartens. The project is run by researchers at the Center for Learning Environment and the UiS Business School and has a Scientific Advisory Board with highly competent and experienced National and International researchers. The project duration is from 2021 - 2025.
SPrELL will support multilingual children's language and literacy learning, motivate caregivers and kindergarten teachers for shared reading by using digital books in multiple languages, and contribute to collaboration with multilingual families.
With the purpose of contributing evidence-based resources, this study aims to provide a systematic evidence map and overview of reviews on school-based language and literacy interventions for all types of multilingual children and adolescents.