Educators, policymakers, and parents have begun to focus more on children's math learning in the earliest years. Yet parents and teachers still find it challenging to know which kinds of early math skills merit attention in the classroom. Determining how to help children achieve in math is important, particularly for children from low-income families who often enter school with weaker math knowledge than their peers. A new longitudinal study conducted in Tennessee has found that low-income children's math knowledge in preschool was related to their later achievement—but not all types of math knowledge were related equally. The findings suggest that educators and school administrators may want to consider carefully which areas of math study they shift attention to as they develop curricula for the early years.
Conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University, the study appears in the journal Child Development.
The study followed 517 low-income children from ages 4 to 11; the children were primarily Black and all qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, a measure of poverty. When the children were in the last year of preschool and near the end of first grade, researchers tested general skills (including self-regulated behavior, work-related skills, and reading) and six math skills (patterning, counting objects, comparing quantities, understanding written numbers, calculating, and understanding shapes). When the children were at the end of fifth grade, researchers tested a range of math knowledge, including knowledge about numbers, algebra, and geometry. The aim of the study was to determine whether children's math skills at ages 4 and 5 predicted their math achievement at age 11.
Preschool math skills supported first-grade math skills, which in turn supported fifth-grade math knowledge, according to the study. In preschool, children's skills in patterning, comparing quantities, and counting objects were stronger predictors of their math achievement in fifth grade than other skills, the study found. By first grade, patterning remained important, and understanding written numbers and calculating emerged as important predictors of later achievement.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 07 2016, @04:17AM
How about plus and minus? It's just a wee bit early to start multiplication tables, or anything more advanced. If a preschooler can make change for a ten dollar bill (without the assistance of a computer), he is already ahead of most of today's high school grads.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 07 2016, @08:21AM
By still insisting on the Fahrenheit scale, Americans deny their children early and natural access to negative numbers.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 07 2016, @08:52AM
Huh? You seem to presume that all Americans grow up in the South. I had early access to negative numbers, in regard to the temperature. At 3 or 4 years old, I understood that -15 F was "colder than a witch's teat". Fortunately, or not, I never found the witch, so I never was able to see just how cold her teats were.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @12:11PM
All the ones that dont, do.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:17PM
Not in Minnesota.
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