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Background. As educational systems around the globe increasingly focus on delivering outcomes and evidence of early childhood education, questions are asked about how increasing the cognitive load on children in preschool settings impacts their development.

Objective. To better understand this problem, a five-year programmatic study was funded by the Australian Research Council with the objective of researching conceptual play as an intervention, studying imagination in play and imagination in science, engineering, and technology.

Design. The study design featured 3,000 teachers, 100 families, and 120 focus infants and toddlers in Australia who were followed for five years.

Results. The study is currently underway. This paper gives an overview and conceptualisation of the research, and the midterm findings. The project expects to generate new knowledge about the concept formation of infants, toddlers, and pre-schoolers under the conditions of a Conceptual PlayWorld in play-based settings and homes.

Conclusion. The projected outcomes are expected to include understanding about how concepts can be intentionally taught in play settings and learned at home for particular cultural age periods. Significant benefits will include increased knowledge of how exposure to these concepts in the formative years affects children’s development.

Drawing on sociocultural theorizing, this case study investigates and unpacks the qualities of scientific play during children’s inquiry-based science activities framed by imagination and play (i.e. Poetry Science). The data were gathered in Finnish preschool groups with children aged five to six years old (N= 31) over a five-week period. The data consist of video recordings, observational field notes, and artifacts, subjected to multimodal analysis. The results show that scientific play that manifested throughout young children’s inquiry process has the following four characteristics: (i) creating and maintaining an imaginary science situation, (ii) assigning new meanings to science objects and processes, (iii) combining imaginary situations and problem solving, and (iv) engaging in science talk in an imaginary situation. The study shows how imagination and play are important elements of children’s science inquiry, with implications for early science education.

Relevance (context) of the subject of the article. The problem of creative abilities is becoming increasingly important in two contexts at once – both in the context of human self-realization, and in the context of the development of practices and production. A special place is occupied by the development of creative abilities in preschool age: even in the works of Lev Vygotsky, it was said about the importance of considering the germs of creativity in the game and fantasy of children. Today, within the framework of the cultural-historical approach, there are a number of scientific schools that study the possibilities of diagnosing and developing children’s creativity.

The aim of the study is to analyze the approaches to the study of children’s creativity in cultural-historical psychology in order to understand what answers to the questions posed by Lev Vygotsky, were discovered over the past decades, and what remained unanswered. It is also important to see how the questions themselves were transformed, since the raising of a new question is a sign of the development of science. The correlation of existing approaches is important for the development of new research programs in the logic of cultural-historical psychology.

Description of the research. The article analyzes various approaches to the research and development of creative abilities: V.V. Davydov and V.T. Kudryavtsev, D.B. Bogoyavlenskaya, N.E. Veraksa and O.M. Dyachenko, V.N. Druzhinin, L.F. Obukhova. The general and specific characteristics of the interpretation of children’s creativity in different approaches of the cultural and historical tradition are highlighted. The conducted research correlates with the questions about the creative nature of the human psyche and about children’s creativity, posed by L.S.Vygotsky.

Research results. The article concludes that despite all the differences in the approaches that have appeared in the logic of the cultural-historical tradition, they are united by the idea of the resourcefulness of preschool childhood and the importance of educational efforts aimed at maintaining the “sprouts of creativity”. In Russian studies, the question is raised about the means of creative abilities that allow us transforming the present situation (dialectical structures and symbols), as well as about the affective-volitional component of the creative process – the ability to detect a task. All this distinguishes the concepts that were born within the framework of the cultural-historical approach from the theory of creativity by J. Guilford and E. Torrance. At the same time, it is indicated that children’s activities (playing, storytelling, experimentation, etc.) are still rarely considered in research as a context for the manifestation of creative abilities.

Conclusion. The article concludes that it is important to conduct new research, both ascertaining and longitudinal, which will allow us to take the next steps in understanding how the means of developing creative abilities are mastered in children’s activities and how this affects the formation of creative abilities in subsequent ages.

The article describes the results of the development and testing of a scale for evaluating conditions for the development of creative abilities in kindergarten. The review part discusses the process of “democratizing the concept of creativity” and changing ideas about the importance of developing creative abilities in preschool childhood as a significant trend in modern psychology and education. The methodological basis of the work is: structural-dialectical approach (N. Veraksa), where the construct of “dialectical thinking” is used to describe intellectual creativity, which is understood as a system of mental actions that allows solving paradoxical situations, transforming contradictory situations in such a way that a new solution to the problem appears; the concept of imagination, which is understood as the ability to “grasp” the whole before the parts and transfer the features of one object of reality to another (Ilyenkov, 1984; Dyachenko, 1996); an approach to the development of ECERS quality assessment scales.

The scale for assessing the conditions for the development of creative abilities in kindergarten presented in the article includes four indicators: understanding of development processes, questioning, invention and transformation of contradictions, imagination.

32 preschool groups took part in the approbation. The validity of the instrument was assessed by the method of contrasting groups identified on the basis of expert assessments. Reliability was determined by the method of consistency of expert assessments: in each group, experts carried out the assessment in pairs and independently of each other. The focus of the observations was: working with imagination, quality questions addressed to children, to allow easy experimentation, supportive emotional atmosphere, sensitivity to children new and original solutions and inventions emphasis is on working with thinking as a process, reflecting the processes of change and transformation, capable to resolve conflicts.

The analysis showed that the assessment tool makes it possible to distinguish between contrasting groups for all four indicators at a significance level not lower than 0.05, which indicates its validity. Also, a high consistency of expert assessments was found both at the level of indicators and at the level of individual indicators, which indicates its reliability. The Alpha-Cronbach coefficient is 0.87, which indicates a good level of internal consistency of the instrument. The tool allows to identify and analyze the parameters of the quality of preschool education, attention to which is not emphasized in other scales, for example, in the ECERS-3 scales for a comprehensive assessment of the quality of preschool education.

The obtained data on the reliability and validity of the developed tool allow us to conclude that it can be used to assess the conditions for supporting and developing the creative abilities of children in preschool groups.

Relevance of this paper is connected with the search for conditions for the development of creative potential in childhood, ensuring readiness for schooling, creating prerequisites for productive learning activities, reducing emotional stress, improving communication skills. The purpose of this theoretical study is to describe various multidimensional approaches to the analysis of the possibilities of creative solution of preschool children’s problems. This paper analyses research on the role of imagination and creativity in children’s mental development.

Two main directions have been identified, which combine, on the one hand, the study of factors influencing the development of children’s creative achievements and, on the other hand, the development of education science approaches that boost creativity. The studies used in the metacognitive analysis show that the creative potential of preschool children is associated with a high level of social behavior, play, creation of a paracosm, language skills, creative storytelling and bilingualism. Development of imagination and creativity of the child can be provided by means of the effective educational program which is connected with use of play creative practices, the constructive educational focused activity, application of Internet technologies, mobile apps, a multicultural basis of the joint decision of problems, perspective planning, perfection of oral and written speech. The received results have shown that various factors and educational sciences approaches positively influence development of creative imagination and creativity. Therefore, it is recommended to continue empirical research aimed at finding possible links between the level of development of verbal generalization, verbal thinking and creative imagination of the child. It is necessary for a competent management of development of creative imagination and creativity in preschool age.

Background. Achieving the quality of preschool education is a priority area of the state educational policy. In this regard, the problem of finding effective mechanisms for the innovative development of the preschool educational system, which guarantees high-quality education for children, is being actualized. The solution of this problem dictates the need to appeal to the creative heritage of scientists recognized in the scientific community, whose works lay the methodological and methodological foundations of children’s education, organized from the standpoint of preserving the self-worth of preschool childhood. One of these scientists is L.A. Paramonova, whose scientific work has largely determined the leading lines of development of preschool education since the 1970s, and has not lost its relevance at the present time.

Objective. Scientific understanding of L.A. Paramonova’s creative heritage and consideration of its potential in solving topical issues of modern preschool education.

Methods. A retrospective and contextual analysis of L.A. Paramonova’s scientific work in the aspects of its contribution both to the development of science about childhood and to the development of modern practice of preschool education.

Results. The analysis of L.A. Paramonova’s scientific heritage has revealed a completely new approach to understanding both the essence of child construction and the mechanisms of its formation as a creative activity. Firstly, L.A. Paramonova’s construction, unlike other scientists, is considered as an independent children’s activity, and not as a game or a means of labor education. Secondly, she interprets construction not only as a practical activity for making specific crafts, but also as a general thinking ability that manifests itself in the creative process of creating various entities (structures, drawings, poems, etc.) and endowing them with individual meanings. This mental ability is the basis for the development of not only design, but also other types of children’s activities. The undoubted merit of L.A. Paramonova is the definition of psychological mechanisms for the formation of creative construction, which she refers to the development of imaginative thinking, productive imagination, the organization of children’s experimentation with new material, the formation of generalized methods of construction. Taking into account these mechanisms, she created a system for the formation of creative design in children aged 2–7 years. Of great importance for the further development of the problem of development in preschool childhood are the highlighted L.A. Paramonova (co-authored) the basic qualities of a child’s personality, acting as a psychological guideline for the organization of the developing educational process.

Conclusion. The new strategy presented in L.A. Paramonova’s researches for the formation of creative design in preschool children, as well as the developed basic qualities of the child’s personality, contribute to solving such fundamental problems of pedagogical and psychological science as the problem of the ratio of learning and creativity; development of children’s activities and the child in it; consistency in learning; determining the principles and content of developmental education in preschool as a child. Scientific work of L.A. Paramonova, who made a significant contribution to enriching the idea of A.V. Zaporozhets’s statement about the role of “specifically children’s activities” in the full-fledged development of a child has not lost its relevance today, and is significant both for pedagogical science and for the practice of preschool education.

Creative imagination is studied at the materialized, perceptual and verbal levels in school-age children. Fifty children from a private school in Puebla, Mexico participated. An evaluation protocol was applied in a collaborative and interactive way under the concept of the zone of proximal development that involves the participation of the evaluator and the use of various types of support: dialogic conversation, repetition of instruction and orientation questions. The results reveal that children access materialized and perceptual action tasks more easily than verbal ones. These results are discussed in terms of the possible implications of the development of creative imagination for school age.