Writing Identity and Self-Efficacy in Early Childhood Across Home and School Contexts

Abstract

Abstract Early writing development involves more than acquiring transcriptional skills; it is closely bound up with the emergence of children's identities as writers and their beliefs in their own capacity to write. Drawing on sociocultural theory and social cognitive theory, this study examined how young children construct writing self-efficacy and writer identity in relation to how parents and educators define and recognize early writing. A convergent mixed-methods design was used to triangulate data from 245 four-year-old children, 87 educators, and 156 parents in public preschool settings in Greece. Semi-structured interviews with children, supported by visual prompts depicting five developmental writing stages (drawing, scribbling, letter strings, invented spelling, and conventional spelling), were paired with parallel educator and parent surveys assessing recognition of, and rationales for, writing at each stage. Descriptive quantitative analysis was used to identify patterns of recognition across developmental stages, and qualitative content analysis was used to explore the rationales underlying these recognition patterns. Findings revealed a developmentally progressive convergence between children's self-perceptions and adults' recognition of their writing: agreement with educators was strongest at the earliest stages (drawing and scribbling), whereas agreement with parents emerged mainly at more conventional stages, with the highest convergence found for invented and conventional spelling. Children's self-identification as writers was strongest when their earliest writing attempts were validated by educators and the broader social environment. These findings suggest that writer identity and self-efficacy in early childhood are shaped not only by children's own developing skills but by the extent to which the adults around them recognize early, non-conventional marks as legitimate writing, underscoring the need for greater alignment between home and school conceptions of what counts as writing.