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Eric.ed.gov – Strengthening Children’s Math Skills with Enhanced Instruction: The Impacts of Making Pre-K Count and High 5s on Kindergarten Outcomes

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Early math skills are a strong predictor of later achievement for young children, not only in math, but in other domains as well. Exhibiting strong math skills in elementary school is predictive of later high school completion and college attendance. To that end, the Making Pre-K Count and High 5s studies set out to rigorously assess whether providing high-quality math instruction, aligned across prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten, could lead to long-term gains across a variety of domains for students growing up in low-income communities in New York City. In Making Pre-K Count, pre-K programs were randomly assigned to receive an evidence-based early math curriculum (Building Blocks) and associated professional development or to a pre-K-as-usual control condition. Pre-K in New York City changed rapidly during the study, with… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Preservice Teachers’ Observations of Children’s Learning during Family Math Night

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Family math night can easily be implemented into mathematics methodology courses providing an opportunity for field-based learning. Preservice teachers were asked to develop and implement an inquiry-based activity at a family math night event held at a local school with personnel, elementary children and their parents in attendance. This action research examines what preservice teachers discovered about how children learn mathematics during their interactions with parents and children. Preservice teachers’ individual reflections focusing on children’s learning were qualitatively analyzed and clustered. In addition, data from teacher educator’s observation notes was used to triangulate findings. Four themes were identified in relation to children’s needs for promoting learning in mathematics: (1) activity adjustment (2) engagement through guiding and questioning (3) motivational issues and (4) the use of manipulatives and… Continue Reading

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tandfonline.com – Is counting hindering learning? An investigation into children’s proficiency with simple addition and their flexibility with mental computation strategies

tandfonline.com har udgivet en rapport under søgningen “Teacher Education Mathematics”: ABSTRACT ABSTRACT There is a growing awareness that many children are not developing fast and accurate retrieval-based strategies for solving single-digit addition problems. In this study we individually assessed 166 third and fourth grade children to identify a group of children (called accurate-min-counters) who frequently solved simple single-digit addition problems using a min-counting strategy and were accurate using it. We investigated if these children were adaptive when it came to using retrieval for simple addition and if they were disadvantaged when it came to demonstrating mental computational flexibility with multi-digit addition. We found accurate-min-counters represented over 30% of participants. These children were often incorrect when they were required to use retrieval for simple addition and were less flexible than most… Continue Reading

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tandfonline.com – Teachers’ and children’s use of words during early childhood STEM teaching supported by robotics

tandfonline.com har udgivet en rapport under søgningen “Teacher Education Mathematics”: ABSTRACT ABSTRACT With science and digitalisation emphasised further in the new Swedish preschool curriculum, there is a need to clarify teachers’ role in educating children in and about these areas. With research pointing out the importance of a conscious language use in STEM teaching, we here focus on words used by teachers and children during inquiry-based STEM activities in five different preschools. Bers’ powerful ideas about early childhood computational thinking (Bers 2018. Coding as a Playground. New York: Routledge.) were used for analysis and results highlight how digital programming and use of robots can promote a more versatile use of robotic words, compared to analogue, ‘unplugged’, programming without robots. Furthermore, it is also found that use of precise decontextualised language… Continue Reading