Move-play-explore in Early Childhood Education

There are growing concerns about low physical activity levels among young children and schoolification of the kindergartens sector. As 97% of 3-5-year-olds in Norway attend kindergarten, the kindergarten is a unique arena for intervention, laying the foundation for equitable development of health, learning and life opportunities. Yet, evidence of scalable, effective and sustainable interventions to increase physical activity and whole-child development among young children is lacking.

In MoveEarly, we will develop and test a pedagogical intervention focusing movement, play and exploration to counteract trends of increased physical inactivity and instructional teaching practices. For such an intervention to be sustainable, kindergarten staff must lead the implementation of the pedagogical innovation. Thus, we will develop theory on move-play-explore as core elements of a child-responsive pedagogy, investigate how this pedagogy affect child developmental outcomes, develop knowledge on how professional development/continuing education can be co-created among researchers and kindergartens staff, and how such an intervention can be effectively implemented in the kindergarten sector.

Two main research questions will be tested using both quantitative and qualitative methods, applied to both the child and organizational levels:

1. How does the MoveEarly intervention impact children's movement competence, creativity, physical activity, physical fitness, playfulness, explorative behaviour, socio-emotional health, well-being, self-regulation, and early academic learning?
2. How does the MoveEarly intervention interact with different kindergarten contexts to produce various individual and organizational outcomes?

These research questions will be investigated using a cluster RCT with randomization at the kindergarten level, including short- (7-month) and long-term (18-month) follow-ups. The intervention development will include strong involvement from kindergarten owners and staff to provide broad support, buy-in and ownership from kindergarten staff and owners. Thus, we aim to combine a large-scale experimental study with tailored, continuous improvement effort in this sector by taking each kindergarten's contextual factors into account. In this model, to make adaptations within each kindergarten is not considered a lack of fidelity; rather it is a desired process of institutionalization overcoming a common criticism of clinical trials as it increases the value for later scaling and dissemination to the real-world setting. In this way, the aim is to create sustainable solutions for improved child development that can be disseminated in the long-term. Thus, the intervention's development, implementation, and evaluation are framed within a "realist RCT" approach. The intervention model is further framed within a socioecological model, placing the kindergarten as an influential factor for children's health and development.