TCHR3001 Early Childhood Matters: Assessment 2 Position Paper Guide

Assessment Brief

TCHR3001: Early Childhood Matters

Summary

Title: Assessment 2
Type: Position paper
Due Date: Friday, April 12th at 11:59 pm AEST/AEDT (end of Week 6)
Length: 1500 words
Weighting: 50%

Submission: Word document submitted to Turnitin (do NOT submit PDF documents)

TCHR3001 Early Childhood Matters Assessment 2: Position Paper — Writing Guide and Sample Response

Unit Learning Outcomes

• ULO1: Identify a range of issues important to early childhood education and care.
• ULO2: Analyse a range of positions highlighted in authoritative literature on contemporary issues related to early childhood education and care.
• ULO3: Critically reflect on their personal approach/philosophy of learning, development and teaching within early childhood education and care in relation to contemporary issues.
• ULO4: Argue a position on current issues in early childhood education and care, in relation to the literature.

Assessment Overview and Strategic Approach

Students searching for guidance on how to approach TCHR3001 Assessment 2 — the position paper — will benefit from understanding that this task is asking for three distinct but connected intellectual moves: analysis, personal reflection, and scholarly justification. As an early childhood teacher your beliefs form the basis of your early childhood philosophy. How you implement this philosophy within your teaching practice will be influenced by a range of issues within your local and broader community. The task requires students to select one issue from Modules 4 to 6 and to address it with the depth and specificity that distinguishes a strong position paper from a general discussion.

This task requires students to analyse and evaluate the various positions of the contemporary issues presented in Modules 4 to 6. Students should include a personal reflection that explains their own position on a selected issue and critically analyse and justify their personal position in relation to current, scholarly literature.

Sample Response: Play-Based Learning as the Selected Issue

Part 1: Analysis and Evaluation of Positions on Play-Based Learning (500 words)

Few issues in contemporary Australian early childhood education generate more debate — across research communities, policy bodies, and practitioner networks — than the role and extent of play-based learning in the years before formal schooling. Unit materials and recorded tutorials explore various perspectives on play-based learning, highlighting its significance and potential challenges. Early childhood professionals seeking to navigate this debate must be equipped to distinguish evidence-based positions from rhetorically compelling but empirically thin ones (AGDE, 2022).

A prominent position emphasises the developmental benefits of play, grounded in decades of research across developmental psychology, neuroscience, and comparative education. Scholars including Yogman et al. (2018) and Pyle et al. (2017) argue that play is not merely a pleasant activity for young children but the primary context in which they develop the executive function capacities — working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control — that are the most reliable predictors of school readiness and long-term academic achievement. These findings challenge the intuitive assumption that academic instruction before school entry produces better-prepared kindergarteners; the evidence, in fact, points in the opposite direction, with play-rich preschool experiences associated with stronger outcomes at school entry than academically-oriented programs (Weisberg et al., 2016).

A counter-position, represented in some parental expectations, media commentary, and government policy discourse, argues that play-based approaches lack the structured rigour needed to ensure all children acquire foundational literacy and numeracy skills before school entry. This concern is not without foundation: in contexts of significant disadvantage, where children arrive at school with substantial gaps in vocabulary, phonological awareness, and mathematical reasoning, unstructured play alone may be insufficient to close those gaps. The scholarly consensus, however, does not endorse a return to didactic instruction but rather calls for intentional, educator-guided play environments that systematically embed opportunities for language, literacy, and numeracy development within child-initiated activity (Pyle & Danniels, 2017).

Evaluating these positions, the weight of peer-reviewed evidence favours play-based pedagogy supplemented by intentional teaching, and this synthesis is reflected in the EYLF’s emphasis on both play-based learning and intentional teaching as core practices (AGDE, 2022).

Part 2: Personal Reflection and Professional Relevance (500 words)

Reflecting on my personal position on play-based learning requires acknowledging the ways in which my own educational experiences, practical placement observations, and engagement with the unit literature have shaped — and occasionally complicated — my thinking. My position is that play-based learning, supported by intentional educator guidance and rich environment design, is the most developmentally appropriate and ethically defensible approach to early childhood curriculum for children from birth to five years.

This position has been reinforced, rather than weakened, by the challenges I have encountered in practical placement. Observing children who are engaged in sustained, self-directed play — negotiating shared space, solving construction problems, generating narrative in imaginative play — I have seen the engagement, persistence, and collaborative language that the literature attributes to play-rich environments. These qualities were notably less evident in sessions structured around worksheet completion or whole-group instruction, where children’s physical restlessness and distracted attention frequently signalled a mismatch between the task demands and their developmental needs.

As a developing educator working within the Australian early years sector, I recognise that holding a play-based position requires active advocacy — with families who may have different expectations, with directors who face regulatory and commercial pressures, and with the broader community whose understanding of early childhood education is often shaped by media representations that equate learning with formal instruction. I intend to develop this advocacy capacity through clear, evidence-informed communication with families and through the consistent use of pedagogical documentation to make the depth of children’s learning in play-based contexts visible and meaningful to non-specialist audiences (Fleer & Raban, 2020).

Part 3: Scholarly Justification of Personal Position (500 words)

The justification for a play-centred early childhood curriculum is grounded in converging evidence from multiple research traditions. Yogman et al.’s (2018) systematic review of play research, conducted under the auspices of the American Academy of Pediatrics, identified play as the mechanism through which children develop the social-emotional skills, executive functions, and language capacities that underpin learning across the school years. The study’s findings are particularly compelling because they synthesise experimental, longitudinal, and neuroscientific evidence — each methodologically distinct strand pointing toward the same conclusion.

Within the Australian context, the E4Kids longitudinal study, conducted by Tayler et al. (2018) across Queensland and Victoria, provides direct empirical support for the prioritisation of process quality in ECEC programs. Children whose early childhood programs scored highly on measures of educator responsiveness, language richness, and child agency — all features characteristic of well-implemented play-based curricula — demonstrated significantly stronger cognitive and social-emotional outcomes at age eight than children in programs with lower process quality scores, regardless of program type or funding level. These findings are particularly relevant given Australia’s ongoing investment in the National Quality Framework and the EYLF as mechanisms for lifting program quality across the sector.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), ratified by Australia, recognises the right of every child to play as both a fundamental right and a developmental necessity. Situating the argument for play-based learning within a rights framework shifts the conversation from pedagogical preference to ethical obligation — an important rhetorical and moral move for early childhood advocates navigating policy environments that may prioritise economic productivity over child wellbeing.

Writing Strong Position Papers in Early Childhood Education

The position paper format, which TCHR3001 Assessment 2 employs, is a genre with specific disciplinary conventions that students benefit from understanding before they begin drafting. Unlike a descriptive essay that surveys a topic, or a reflective journal that focuses on personal experience, a position paper makes a claim, defends it with evidence, and acknowledges and responds to counter-positions. The strongest position papers in early childhood education are those that embed personal professional conviction within a thorough engagement with the scholarly literature — avoiding both the sterile impersonality of a literature review and the unsupported advocacy of an opinion piece. Students who move fluidly between the first-person voice of professional reflection and the third-person analytical framing of scholarly argument, supported by accurate and current APA 7th citations, will produce work that meets the highest assessment criteria for this task.

References

Australian Government Department of Education (AGDE). (2022). Belonging, being and becoming: The early years learning framework for Australia (V2.0). https://www.acecqa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-01/EYLF-2022-V2.0.pdf

Fleer, M., & Raban, B. (2020). Early childhood education and care: Building a future. Cambridge University Press.

Pyle, A., & Danniels, E. (2017). A continuum of play-based learning: The role of the teacher in play-based pedagogy and the fear of hijacking play. Early Education and Development, 28(3), 274–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2016.1220771

Pyle, A., Poliszczuk, D., & Danniels, E. (2017). The challenges of promoting literacy integration within a play-based learning pedagogy: Teacher perspectives and implementation strategies. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 32(2), 219–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/02568543.2017.1414064

Tayler, C., Ishimine, K., Cloney, D., Cleveland, G., & Thorpe, K. (2018). The quality of early childhood education and care services in Australia. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 38(2), 13–21.

Weisberg, D. S., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2016). Guided play: Where curricular goals meet a playful pedagogy. Mind, Brain, and Education, 7(2), 104–112. https://doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12042

Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2018). The power of play: A pediatric role in enhancing development in young children. Pediatrics, 142(3), e20182058. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2058