School readiness and executive functions

The age children start school varies across countries, but in Singapore children begin primary school around age 6 or 7 years. Prior to this, it is increasingly common for Singaporean children to attend infant care and preschool, as is also true in many countries worldwide. This presents an invaluable opportunity to not only prepare children for primary education, but also to potentially reduce gaps among children from disadvantaged home environments. Schools place increasing demands and expectations on children and require them to engage in formal structured learning activities. It is important to ascertain when children are ready for this next step. School readiness is a multidimensional construct that comprises cognitive, language, social-emotional-behavioural, physical and learning skills that enable children to learn and thrive in a school [9,10]. School readiness has been measured in terms of the understanding of basic concepts including colours, letters, numbers, shapes and social-emotional competence [11], as well as in terms of (pre-)academic abilities including (emerging) literacy skills and (emerging) mathematical knowledge [12]. Children vary in their school readiness and the extent to which children are ready for school when they start schooling has significant impacts on their social and academic achievement trajectories [13–17].

EFs are a constellation of partially dissociable higher-order cognitive processes that allow goal-directed behaviour. Significant development of EFs occurs between the ages of 3 and 5 years [18], which is the age which many children attend preschool. EFs play a significant role in the ability to regulate attention, emotion and behaviour in preschool children, which are essential for successful engagement in the classroom [19]. EFs provide a foundation for academic achievement and school performance by contributing to the children’s social functioning, emotion regulation and intentional learning [20]. This is exemplified by evidence that EFs are associated with children’s academic trajectories [13,21,22]. Cameron and colleagues report evidence for co-development of EFs and academic skills with improvements in EFs being associated with improvements in applied problem solving in 5 year old children, EF sub-domains were not assessed separately in this investigation [21]. Furthermore, EFs have long-term effects impacting several domains including academic success, impulse control, constraint and emotion regulation [23]. Previous intervention research indicates that EFs can be malleable and training of EFs has been linked to early academic success [13,24,25]. This highlights the critical role of EFs in school readiness and wider child development, as well as the importance of identifying factors that support development of EFs and the mechanisms by which this development occurs.

Teacher scaffolding and interpersonal synchrony

Preschool teachers have a central role in their class’s preschool experience and development. Vygotsky’s [26] sociocultural theory dictates that learning is a social activity that occurs most effectively in social interaction with others. Additionally, children’s learning and development are optimally supported by scaffolding or assistance from more competent individuals [26]. Teachers may scaffold children’s learning by temporarily providing support to the child to allow them to complete a task that they would not be able to complete independently. As the child’s skill level increases, the teacher may gradually withdraw their support as the child becomes more capable until the child can complete the new task independently [27].

Scaffolding has been researched in the context of storybook reading (also referred to as read aloud; see 28) due to the frequency of this activity in preschools [28]. Storybook reading has a predictable, routinised format in which teachers can explore various texts with children, which has been reported to scaffold children’s emerging literacy skills [29]. Dialogic reading is an example of a common scaffolding technique employed during storybook reading contexts. This involves collaborative storytelling, in which the reader identifies and poses problems to the child and then scaffolds their answers [4,30]. Children’s participation in storybook reading sessions has been associated with positive effects of vocabulary growth [31–33] and comprehension [34,35], as well as giving children the opportunity to have more sophisticated conversations, going beyond perceptual understanding of stories and considering conceptual features [36]. Like EFs, children vary widely in their emergent literacy skills. Upon starting school many children know the alphabet, whereas many others do not [37]. To understand how children acquire literacy skills from their teacher, a dyadic storybook reading task has been developed to explore how preschool teachers scaffold children’s novel word learning and story comprehension.

One mechanism thought to influence exchange of knowledge between teacher and student is interpersonal neural synchrony. It has been theorised that this provides a neural underpinning for interpersonal exchange [38]. Interpersonal synchrony has been suggested to facilitate internal predictions about the self and predictions about the behaviour of others thereby optimising interactions [39]. Neuro-behavioural synchrony is posited to be an optimal learning environment for a child [40]; therefore, the present study aims to explore the contributions of interpersonal synchrony between teacher and child to the child’s learning outcomes.

Neural synchrony has been studied in preschool-age children previously using problem solving tasks. For example, Nguyen and colleagues [41] compared neural synchrony between preschool-age children and their parents when completing Tangram puzzles cooperatively, or independently. Unlike storybook reading, puzzle solving does not have an inherent rhythmicity making it an interesting context in which to study synchrony as synchrony is less likely to be masked by the rhythmicity of the task. Neural synchrony was greater under cooperative conditions and was associated with improved problem-solving performance [41]. Neural synchronisation was reported in temporal brain areas, which have been associated with effective social communication and mentalizing [42,43], as well as frontal areas, which have been previously associated with interactive decision making and EFs [42,43]. This highlights the relationship between EFs and their possible role in establishing neural synchrony or vice versa. The current investigation will use a range of teacher-child interaction tasks to assess the relative contribution of interpersonal neural synchrony to novel word learning and problem solving [44].

The current investigation

This study will assess the relationship between teacher-child neural synchrony, child development of EFs and school readiness in preschool-age children. Children will be assessed cross-sectionally between the ages of 2 and 7 years. Children will complete EFs, vocabulary and school readiness assessments. Additionally, children and teachers will take part in interactive tasks whilst undergoing dyadic electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings to assess teacher-child interpersonal neural synchrony.

Study objectives and research questions:

1. Which teacher-child behavioural interaction characteristics are associated with individual differences in preschool children’s executive function and school readiness?
2. Does teacher-child neural synchrony during scaffolded tasks predict learning outcomes, including executive function and school readiness?

Explorative analyses:

1. Do different forms of teacher scaffolding (e.g., patterns of multimodal ostensive signals or dialogic reading framework) relate differentially to behavioural or neural synchrony?
2. How do teacher individual characteristics (e.g., EF, stress, temperament) moderate the relationship between scaffolding and child outcomes?

The study protocol will be described in eight main sections: study preparation, EFs tasks, school readiness assessment, vocabulary assessment, teacher-child interaction tasks, creative problem solving tasks, neurophysiological measures and questionnaire measures.

Study preparation

Vocabulary assessment

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test is a standardised norm-referenced measure of receptive vocabulary based on Standard American English [52]. Children hear spoken words and are asked to point to the corresponding picture. A version that has been adapted and normed for a Singapore population [53] will be used.

Teacher-child interaction tasks

Neurophysiological measures

Whilst performing the teacher-child interaction tasks including the cooperation task, storybook reading task and creative problem tasks, as well as the EFs tasks, teachers and children will be asked to undergo concurrent EEG and ECG recordings. The EEG will be recorded using 32-channel system in a standard international 10/20 configuration. Event triggers will be sent to the EEG amplifiers to ensure synchronisation with task stimuli.

Questionnaire measures

We will also administer teacher and caregiver self-report questionnaires, as well as caregiver-report questionnaires covering temperament, child behavior, parenting and family background information, such as their home language environment, parental education, household income etc.

Analysis plan

A combination of standard regression and machine learning methods will be used to identify characteristics of teacher-child social interactions that significantly predict EFs and school readiness scores (Research Question 1). Examples of behavioural indices of interaction quality are ostensive signals (gaze, speech, gestures), number of teacher prompts used, difficulty level of teacher prompts, number of prompts responded to by the child and complexity of child response. These behavioural indices of interaction quality along with individual teacher and child characteristics, such as personality or temperament, will be used to as factors to predict child EFs and school readiness. Data reduction methods such as least partial squares or principal components analysis may be used to reduce the dimensionality of data and prevent multicollinearity issues. These reduced factors will be used to predict school readiness and EFs.

To explore which characteristics of teacher-child neural coupling are associated with successful teacher-child interactions (Research Question 2) indices of neural coupling will be calculated from the dyadic EEG data and will be analysed in relation to learning outcomes on scaffolding tasks, as well as the behavioural indices of interaction quality that explain the most variance in EFs and school readiness. Examples of indices of neural coupling are weighted phase lag index (wPLI) or partial directed coherence (PDC). wPLI is a non-directional measure of neural coupling which will describe linear dependencies between the phase neural oscillations between two channels. This may be used to measure connectivity within the teacher or child’s brain, as well as between the teacher and child’s brains. PDC, alternatively, is a directed measure of connectivity and will provide additional information about the directionality of the flow of information. We will also explore the extent to which synchrony in the participants ECG is associated with successful teacher-child interactions.

For data-driven analyses, the combination of dyadic EEG and behavioural interaction data will be used to create multimodal AI models to phenotype children who are at risk of poorer school readiness outcomes. Specifically, we intend to utilise models such as cumulative link [76] and ordinal temporal deep learning models [77] to predict school readiness and executive functions. The use of neurophysiological recordings alone, as well as a combination of both neurophysiology and behavioural data mentioned in previous sections will be explored. Such models will be trained using mean squared error and likelihood-based objective functions to ensure best model fit [78]. The use of such models would also allow latent state analysis since both these models effectively learn low-dimensional features from high-dimensional neurophysiological and behavioural data relevant to executive functions and school readiness leading to mechanistic insights.

Significance and impact

An ever-growing number of children are attending infant care and preschool worldwide, the quality of early education programmes varies considerably across providers, and neuro-scientifically validated teaching approaches are lacking. This project will explore empirical brain-based evidence on how early learning and EF development can be best supported by teacher-child interactions before entering primary school. Since good quality teacher-child interaction is likely to produce positive effects irrespective of the child’s intelligence and socio-economic status, this project may provide insights to assist in the development of policies to reduce economic-based school achievement gaps.

This project will explore the relationship between EFs, school readiness and teacher-student interaction. School readiness is particularly important and challenging for children with social and behavioural difficulties; individual differences in EFs are related to variations in school readiness in these children. A greater understanding of the interplay between EFs, school readiness and teacher-student interaction may stimulate the development of target interventions, as well as contribute to the development of new neuroscience-based metrics of teaching quality that could be useful in teacher training contexts.

Traditionally, teacher-child interactions are measured using behavioural observations or teacher reports, yielding modest to moderate effect sizes. While behavioural observations are often regarded as a gold standard, being more objective than self-reports, they come with several methodological disadvantages, such as being time-consuming and vulnerable to observer bias. This study will leverage on recent advances in hyperscanning and statistical analysis to adopt a sophisticated, sensitive and objective measure of teacher-child social interaction quality and success, based on dyadic brain-imaging measures. The combination of brain-imaging indices with traditional measures of social interaction quality will permit a deeper, more nuanced and precise understanding of the factors and neural mechanisms that underpin successful teacher-child interactions, and how these stimulate children’s early development of EFs.

Limitations and future directions

The interactive tasks were developed to encourage the naturalistic dynamics of teacher-student interactions, which are likely to vary between teacher-student dyads, to increase the ecological validity and generalisability of the results. This is, however, at the sacrifice of experimental control. It is acknowledged that different scaffolding styles or approaches are likely to affect scaffolding effectiveness, but as scaffolding style or approach will not be experimentally manipulated here, the study is not optimised to detect such differences. Future research could seek to experimentally vary teacher scaffolding style or approach.

The current investigation will focus on EFs, school readiness and teacher-student interactions in typically developing children, but there are an ever-growing number of neurodevelopmental risk factors and disorders that put preschool children at-risk for poorer developmental outcomes. Future research should seek to explore the relationship between EFs, school readiness and teacher-student interactions in groups of children with neurodevelopmental risk factors and disorders.

While the study is conducted in Singapore and findings may reflect cultural and contextual factors unique to this setting, Singapore’s diverse, multilingual, and multicultural society makes it a compelling model for investigating early education practices in highly developed, globally connected contexts; nonetheless, cross-cultural replication will be important to assess generalisability.