The Content Analysis And Inspirations Of "Approaches To Learning" Domin Of State Early Learning Standards In The United States

Improving the quality of early childhood education, upgrading school readiness for preschool children, developing and promoting early learning standards (ELSs) are major trends in early child education around the world in 21st century. The United States plays an important role in the process of developing ELSs, meanwhile more and more states regard approaches to learning as a separate field of children’s learning and developing in ELSs.The approaches to learning (AL) refers to children to show the inclinations, attitudes, habits and styles in the diverse ways of learning. It is not point to the specific skills children, but how children acquire and use themselves to learning a wide range of skills. Although Guidelines to Learning and Development of Children Aged 3-6 in 2012 which promulgated by Ministry of Education of China didn’t take AL as a separate field, it emphasized the importance of children’s AL. From the Guidelines, the details of the contents and indicators of AL, and how to cultivate children’s AL are not explained. This paper collected 51 documents of ELSs which covers 50 states and one special administrative district, analyzed the 51 ELSs documents with information retrieval and content analysis method for the domain of AL, The results of the study can give us a comprehensive knowledge of children’s AL and can provide useful suggestions for the implementation, revision and improvement of the Guidelines.Results indicate that the state ELSs pay more attention to the domain of AL, and the structure of this domain is rigorous and clear. The sub-domain of AL is comprehensive, but the state ELSs pay more attention to curiosity and initiative, engagement and persistence, creativity, invention and imagination, reasoning and problem solving, reflection and interpretation. Studies of performance indicators show that children’s curiosity and initiative mainly refers to a sense of curiosity which show interested in people, matters, the surrounding environment and learning. When faced to new and challenging things, they are able to ask questions and actively explore activities to discover and solve problems, to construct their own knowledge system and demonstrate self-orentation in the activities; Children’s engagement and persistence mainly refers to the ability of fully participating in and concentrating in activities. Children can accept appropriate challenge and show the spirit of persistence and use some strategies to complete the task, such as seeking help, making a plan to finish the task; Children’s creativity, invention and imagination mainly refer to the ability of using the innate creativity and imagination to developing learning. They can use imagination to produce a variety of ideas during activities, and try to solve the problem with new ideas. They also can participate in imaginative social play, express self creatively through music, movement, construction and art; Children’s reasoning and problem solving mainly refers to the ability of recognize problems and try to use a variety of ways to explore varieties of solutions; Children’s reflection and interpretation mainly refers to the ability of absorbing, thinking and understanding the existing knowledge and information, applying the feeling, experience and knowledge to the new situations, describing and showing the situation and action in memory. After the activity, the child can carry on the thinking and evaluation to the event and experience to know what they learned from the activity, so as to better learning in the future. Studies of the supportive strategies and activities show that its major target audiences are children and adults. Adults includes teachers, caregivers and family members, that include the examples of children’s behavior, adult’s practise, supportive environment and resourses; the presentation of the supporting strategies and activities is given priority to captions and examples.By analyzing the approaches to learning domain of state ELSs, a preliminary inspirations for the implementation and revision of Guidelines to Learning and Development of Children Aged 3-6 have been advanced:pay high attention to approaches to learning and regard it as a separate field; the structure of AL domain should be rigorous and easy understanding and feasible; support the individual differences of AL. At the same time this paper points out some limitations and implications for future research.