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More school games

In view of the results of the Geneva study, one may wonder how to develop these skills in the youngest. For Sylvie Richard, professor at HEP-Valais and researcher at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at UNIGE, play is a privileged field in this respect: « Playing engages the body and gives the opportunity to Learn to regulate your emotions and better control yourself. In fighting games, for example, children experience self-control. In role plays, they learn to negotiate, agree and cooperate. These are also an opportunity to manipulate mathematical knowledge, as when playing the merchant, for example. Far from being futile, these playful moments are on the contrary rich in various explorations. They promote the cognitive development of children but also their imagination, which is why Sylvie Richard is campaigning for them to have more room in the classroom, even among the older ones.

What if academic success did not depend solely on intellectual faculties? More and more studies in psychology and the sciences of education are interested in the fundamental capacities that young children should develop at the start of school in order to carry out and succeed in their schooling. Many works have already shown close links between emotions and cognition (memory, attention), as evidenced by Edouard Gentaz, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Geneva (UNIGE): « Knowledge of emotions contributes significantly to academic achievement and is a long-term predictor of social behavior and early grade outcomes.” Social skills and those related to motor activity also play an important role in learning processes, according to various studies.

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But little research on this subject focuses on children aged 3 to 6 years. To fill this gap, a team of researchers from the University of Geneva developed a study in collaboration with the Haute École Pédagogique du Valais and teachers from Savoie, France. The objective of this research, the results of which have been published in the journal Scientific Reports*was to look at how knowledge of emotions, social behavior (children’s ability to cooperate) and locomotor activity (or physical skill) are associated and related to digital skills in 706 students aged 3 to 6 years.

An original and tailor-made study

The study is original in more ways than one: « The links between these different variables and the role of each in the learning process have already been studied, but for the first time, they are in a single research “, comments Thalia Cavadini, researcher at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at UNIGE and first author of the study.

Also, unlike most of the work that examines school results in the light of tasks involving language skills, this study focuses on children’s digital skills: “Performance on this type of task is less influenced by socio-economic level. parents’ economy than on language tasks. It seemed all the more important to control this factor given the size and heterogeneity of our sample”, indicates the researcher. To be as close as possible to the reality on the ground, the different stages of the research were developed with the help of the teachers. For their part, the latter participated in a training workshop to pass the tests (read framed) to students in a standardized way.

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What did the researchers find? Their study reveals that socio-emotional skills as well as those related to physical agility are interdependent and associated with digital skills in children aged 3 to 6, confirms Thalia Cavadini: « Indeed, thanks to specific statistical analyses, we We have shown that obtaining high scores on the various tests predicts better mathematical performance. But these are correlations and not causation between the variables.” These results agree with the scientific consensus on the subject: “We tend to focus on school subjects, while there is also a major stake in the socio-emotional aspects. Knowing how to manage your emotions frees up cognitive resources,” explains Sylvie Richard, professor at HEP-Valais and researcher at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at UNIGE. Knowing how to cooperate too, continues the latter: “We need others – teachers, peers – to learn and face stressful situations related to learning.”

This study reminds once again that the musculoskeletal aspects should not be neglected. Indeed, it is also through activities that engage the body that young children can exercise what is called « inhibitory control », explains the UNIGE professor: « To be able to perform their movements and demonstrate coordination in physical agility tests, children had to exercise control over their thoughts and resist external distractions. This capacity for self-control is also necessary when it comes to solving mathematical activities.

Procedure and tests

Knowledge of emotions was assessed through two tasks, the first consisting in recognizing primary emotions (anger, fear, joy and sadness) and neutral facial expression, the second in understanding the causes of these emotions through scenarios involving on stage characters in particular situations. For example, among five illustrations, the child had to indicate and then name the emotion that could be felt by a boy who had just received a present for his birthday.

The assessment of the ability to cooperate was done through team games (with and without a ball), where the children had to recognize their team, participate in the game and show their ability to collaborate with others to achieve a goal. It was then through an agility course (moving in balance on a beam, climbing wall bars, crawling under benches, hanging from rings, swinging, for example) that the children’s motor skills were tested. .

Finally, the evaluation of mathematical skills included three numerical tests adapted to the age of the children, where it was a question of identifying the cardinal of a number, then counting and deciding between collections by indicating the one where there was the more, less and the same number of objects, and finally to complete algorithmic sequences.

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*Cavadini, T., Richard, S., Dalla-Libera, N. et al. Emotion knowledge, social behavior and locomotor activity predict the mathematical performance in 706 preschool children. Sci Rep 2021;11:14399.

Published in Le Matin Dimanche on 04/10/2022.


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