Lehrstuhl für Empirische Pädagogik und Pädagogische Psychologie (EN)
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TrainKids Project

Bitte beachten Sie die deutsche Version

Project title:

TrainKids: Cognitive training in kindergarten and insights into cognitive activities at home

Type of project and funding:

  • Internal funding
  • TrainKids research has been supported twice by the Funds for Equality in Research and Teaching from LMU Munich
    • First funding: 06/2021-12/2021
    • Second funding: 11/2022-03/2023

Duration:

10/2020 - ongoing

Project team:

Project description:

The kindergarten years are not only important for children’s learning in early literacy and numeracy, but also for the advancement of their cognitive skills. Executive functions are an important set of cognitive processes for monitoring and controlling of behaviours. They comprise working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility, and these components predict academic achievement before children start school. Therefore, early training of executive functions potentially offers a new perspective for early educational activities and for children’s later school success.


A very important environment to advance academic and cognitive skills is the home learning environment (HLE), in which children and their parents can actively interact and learn together. The HLE plays a critical role in young children’s learning, however, it has hardly ever been considered in cognitive training research.


In TrainKids, our approach is to train children through digital devices (e.g., tablets), because nowadays children live in media rich environments and digital tools are interesting and attractive for young children. Digital media presents an opportunity to improve young children’s cognitive skills and school readiness with their potential of long-term learning benefits.


The current project is designed as a randomized experimental design with two experimental and one control group. The aim is to support young children’s executive functions, and also to get insights into the cognitive activities children are doing at home. Both, children’s cognitive and academic skills are assessed at different time points and they are given digital cognitive training for a minimum of 2 to 3 times per week. At the end of the project, we hope to understand whether young children can benefit from app-based cognitive training and if so, how long these benefits last. The role the HLE plays for general skills will also be assessed to understand the association of cognitive activities at home with children’s general cognitive skills.