Guide to EYLF Outcome 4

The Early Years Learning Framework is made up of 8 EYLF Principles, 7 EYLF Practices, and 5 EYLF Learning Outcomes.

The EYLF Learning Outcomes are designed to capture the learning and development of all children from birth up until 5 years of age. They are:

• EYLF Outcome 1: Children have a strong sense of identity

• EYLF Outcome 2: Children are connected with and contribute to their world

• EYLF Outcome 3: Children have a strong sense of wellbeing

• EYLF Outcome 4: Children are confident and involved learners

• EYLF Outcome 5: Children are effective communicators

What is EYLF Outcome 4: children are confident and involved learners

Children's learning is holistic, integrating their senses, physical movement, emotions, and thinking. When children feel safe and have positive wellbeing, they are more confident to explore, experiment, and engage actively in learning. Recognising and including children's own knowledge, along with their family and community experiences, helps them connect prior understanding to new experiences.

Children think and learn through active processes such as questioning, problem-solving, collaboration, and exploration. These experiences, shaped by interactions with others and their environment, support brain development and executive functioning. Learning how their brain works and adopting strategies like a growth mindset promotes lifelong learning.

Developing dispositions such as curiosity, persistence, and creativity allows all children to fully engage in learning. Confident learners can apply knowledge in new contexts, access resources, and begin to take ownership of their learning and social contributions. Learning deepens through shared thinking between children and educators, and continuity across different settings strengthens children's sense of belonging.

Children make sense of themselves and the world through hands-on, meaningful experiences. A supportive, engaging environment promotes sustained concentration and active participation, reflecting their individual learning styles and ways of seeing the world. Through active involvement, children expand their understanding, generate new knowledge, and grow intellectually and socially.

Educators play a key role in knowing each child and creating environments and experiences that support their full participation and maximise their learning potential.

The 4 Key Indicators of EYLF Outcome 4

EYLF Outcome 4 is made up of 4 key indicators:

• Children develop a growth mindset and learning dispositions such as curiosity, cooperation, confidence, creativity, commitment, enthusiasm, persistence, imagination and reflexivity

• Children develop a range of learning and thinking skills and processes such as problem solving, inquiry, experimentation, hypothesising, researching and investigating

• Children transfer and adapt what they have learned from one context to another

• Children resource their own learning through connecting with people, place, technologies and natural and processed materials

Children develop a growth mindset and learning dispositions such as curiosity, cooperation, confidence, creativity, commitment, enthusiasm, persistence, imagination and reflexivity

Evidence of children develop a growth mindset and learning dispositions such as curiosity, cooperation, confidence, creativity, commitment, enthusiasm, persistence, imagination and reflexivity:

• Expressing wonder and interest in their environments

• Being curious and enthusiastic participants in their learning

• Sharing their ideas with others and asking questions of adults

• Using play to investigate, experiment, test hypotheses, imagine and explore ideas

• Following and extending their own interests with enthusiasm, energy and concentration

• Initiating and contributing to play experiences emerging from their own ideas

• Participating in a variety of rich and meaningful inquiry-based experiences

• Exploring diverse ways of knowing, being and doing in their learning

• Persevering and experiencing the satisfaction of achievement

• Persisting even when they find a task difficult

• Using positive self-talk when trying to overcome a problem or setback

• Revisiting previous learning experiences and planning new challenges

• Engaging in creative experiences such as art, dance and drama

• Positively responding to and incorporating the ideas of others to construct new learning

• Using their senses to play, explore and try new things

• Talking about what is happening in their brain when they are learning new things.

Educators can promote this learning by:

• Recognising and valuing children's involvement in learning

• Providing learning environments that are flexible and open-ended

• Responding to children's displays of learning dispositions by commenting on them and providing encouragement and additional ideas

• Modelling strategies such as positive self-talk to assist children to manage struggles and cope with challenges or setbacks

• Providing feedback to children focused on effort and process over outcome or product

• Encouraging children to engage in both individual and collaborative explorative learning processes

• Listening carefully to children's ideas and discussing with them how these ideas might be developed

• Including a growth mindset model in their everyday activities

• Finding out how to talk to children about how their brains work and how it grows as they learn

• Providing opportunities for children to revisit their ideas and extend their thinking

• Modelling inquiry processes, including wonder, curiosity and imagination, trying new ideas and taking on challenges

• Reflecting with children on what and how they have learned

• Build on the funds of knowledge, languages and understandings that children bring to their early childhood setting

• Exploring the diversity of cultures and social identities

• Critically reflect on personal responses to cultural diversity that includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture

• Create responsive learning environments that promote shared sustained thinking.

Children develop a range of learning and thinking skills and processes such as problem solving, inquiry, experimentation, hypothesising, researching and investigating

Evidence of children developing a range of learning and thinking skills and processes such as problem solving, inquiry, experimentation, hypothesising, researching and investigating:

• Using trial and error to explore different possibilities through 'cause and effect'

• Initiating investigative play to solve self-generated problems and discoveries

• Applying a wide variety of thinking strategies to engage with situations and solve problems, and adapt these strategies to new situations

• Creating and using representation to organise, record and communicate mathematical ideas and concepts

• Making predictions and generalisations about their daily activities, aspects of the natural world and environments, using patterns they generate or identify and communicate these using mathematical language and symbols

• Exploring their environment through asking questions, experimenting, investigating and using digital technologies

• Connecting with their local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community (e.g. Elders, role models) to engage with stories about place-based history and culture

• Manipulating objects and experiment with 'cause and effect', trial and error, and motion

• Contributing to mathematical discussions and arguments

• Using reflective thinking to consider why things happen and what can be learned from these experiences

• Developing and testing theories to solve problems

• Using a range of strategies and digital tools to organise and represent mathematical and scientific thinking

• Using a range of media to express their ideas through the arts, e.g. clay, drawing, paint, digital technologies

• Engaging with culturally relevant objects to test ideas and represent mathematical concepts.

Educators can promote this learning by:

• Planning learning environments that are flexible, with appropriate levels of challenge where children are encouraged to explore, experiment and take appropriate risks in their learning

• Recognising mathematical understandings that children bring to learning and build on these in ways that are relevant to each child

• Providing resources for very young children to explore the properties of materials through manipulating, rotating, collecting, transporting and positioning

• Providing children with resources that offer challenge, intrigue and surprise, support their investigations and share their enjoyment

• Providing experiences that encourage children to investigate and solve problems

• Using language to describe (verbalise) back to children their investigations and learning experiences

• Talking to children about how the brain works

• Encouraging children to use language to describe and explain their ideas

• Providing opportunities for involvement in experiences that support the investigation of ideas, complex concepts and thinking, reasoning and hypothesising

• Helping and encouraging children to express or make visible their ideas and theories to others

• Modelling mathematical and scientific language, e.g. count out loud and point out patterns

• Joining in children's play and modelling reasoning, predicting and reflecting processes and language

• Intentionally scaffolding children's understandings, including description of strategies for approaching problems

• Listening carefully to children's attempts to hypothesise and expand on their thinking through conversation and questioning

• Providing opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educators to provide feedback and reflect on everyday practices within their setting

• Ensuring documentation of learning is visible to encourage the revisiting of ideas and concepts

• Supporting children's extended investigations with flexible schedules to allow for multiple solutions and ways of thinking to be explored

• Modelling the use of digital technologies and media to assist children to investigate and document their findings

• Using cooking experiences, as well as sand and water play, to support mathematical and scientific skills such as observation, reasoning and measurement.

Children transfer and adapt what they have learned from one context to another

Evidence of children transferring and adapting what they have learned from one context to another:

• Practicing and imagining relationships and experiences in their daily lives through pretend or symbolic play

• Engaging with others to co-construct learning

• Developing an ability to mirror, repeat and practice the actions of others, either immediately or later

• Making connections between experiences, concepts and processes

• Using the processes of play, reflection and investigation to solve problems

• Applying generalisations from one situation to another

• Trying out strategies that were effective to solve problems in one situation in a new context

• Transferring knowledge from one setting to another

• Using strategies to reflect on and assess their learning and thinking.

Educators can promote this learning by:

• Providing play opportunities and realistic materials that reflect children's daily lives

• Valuing signs of children applying their learning in new ways and talk about this with them in ways that grow their understanding

• Supporting children to construct multiple solutions to problems and use different ways of thinking

• Drawing children's attention to patterns and relationships in the environment and in their learning

• Planning for time and space where children can reflect on their learning and to see similarities and connections between existing and new learning

• Sharing and transferring knowledge about children's learning from one setting to another, by exchanging information with families and with professionals in other settings

• Scaffolding children's understandings of how skills and ideas can be transferred to other activities through conversation and questions

• Providing opportunities for all educators to participate in acknowledging Country and how this can be used in different settings

• Encouraging children to discuss their ideas and understandings

• Encouraging and enabling children to reflect on and assess their learning, including progress and next steps towards their learning goals

• Understanding that competence is not tied to any particular language, dialect or culture.

Children resource their own learning through connecting with people, place, technologies and natural and processed materials

Evidence of children resourcing their own learning through connecting with people, place, technologies and natural and processed materials:

• Engaging in learning relationships with a wide diversity of people

• Using their senses and body movements to explore natural and built materials and environments

• Experiencing the benefits and pleasures of shared learning explorations, investigations and imaginary play scenarios

• Exploring the purpose and function of a range of tools, media, sounds and graphics

• Manipulating natural and manufactured materials and resources to investigate, take apart, assemble, invent and construct

• Experimenting with different technologies

• Using digital technologies and media to investigate and problem solve

• Exploring ideas and theories using imagination, creativity and play

• Using feedback from themselves and others to revise and build on an idea

• Engaging in meaningful conversations about natural and processed materials

• Creating and constructing artwork in a sustainable way, using natural and manufactured materials and

• tools, drawing on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories, history, culture, customs and celebrations

• Retelling or create simple stories using materials or drama to represent ideas

• Expressing and responding to ideas and feelings using a range of creative media including photography

• and digital technologies

• Exploring 2D and 3D forms of expression to develop understandings of different art forms and elements.

Educators can promote this learning by:

• Providing opportunities and support for children to engage in meaningful relationships that provide positive learning opportunities

• Providing sensory and exploratory experiences with a wide variety of open-ended natural and processed materials

• Providing experiences that involve children in the broader community and environment beyond the early childhood setting

• Thinking carefully about how children are grouped for play, considering possibilities for peer scaffolding

• Selecting and introducing appropriate tools, technologies and media and provide the skills, knowledge and techniques to enhance children's learning

• Providing opportunities for children to both construct and take apart materials as a strategy for learning

• Developing their skills and knowledge with digital technologies and media in their curriculum to use them confidently with children

• Providing resources that encourage children to represent their thinking

• Creating opportunities to discuss with colleagues the diverse ways of embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives into everyday practice

• Thoughtfully introducing questions and adopting active listening approaches to prompt problem solving and creative solutions.

What next for understanding EYLF Outcome 4?

Using these examples in accordance with EYLF principles and practices ensures that educators are assisting children in achieving EYLF Outcome 4.

But it's also important to show evidence. So here's 3 ways to help your team when it comes to educating children:

1. Use a tool that helps saved educators 4hrs per week on documentation - Book Your FREE Demo Today!

2. Get some more resources on the EYLF from ACECQA.

3. Download the EYLF Outcome 4 Sheet below, so you always have this on-hand ⬇️