Browsing by Author "Vuorela, Mirva"

Objectives. According to the Finnish National core Curriculum, one of the objectives of early childhood education and care is to support children's evolving skills of participation and influence, to which the skills of public performing are unequivocally linked. The presence of performance anxiety can be considered a key obstacle in the development of these skills. According to previous studies, performing anxiety can limit an individual's life in many ways, decrease success in studies and lead to challenges in promoting an individual’s working life. The purpose of this study is to find out how much scientific information the personnel in early childhood education and care have at their disposal when planning, evaluating, and further developing the content areas of early childhood education, taking the aspect of performing anxiety into consideration. Methods. This study was started out as a systematic literature review by searching for data from three scientific databases of remarkable importance with suitable search clauses. Based on the definition of concepts relevant to this study, search clauses were formed considering the individual search guidelines for each database. The search results were collected in tables and their relevance to this study assessed accordingly. After analyzing the retrieved data and based on the results obtained, the focus was turned to deeper theoretical cerebration on the phenomenon of performing anxiety in the context of early childhood education. Results and conclusions. Pedagogical attention should be paid to the development and control of performing anxiety during early childhood education in the spirit of the National Core Curriculum of Early Childhood Education. In practice, however, there is little to none scientific data available to early childhood education and care personnel on which to base the practicing of the skills of public performing, taking the aspect of performance anxiety into account.