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from the probably-where-I-went-wrong dept.
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:06AM
Computer tech will enslave and abuse kids and teachers, unless schools stop using non-free proprietary user-subjugating software. Want to view the source code to see how the software works? You can't because it's proprietary. Want to make a change to the software? It's proprietary, so you can't. Want to hire independent developers to make changes to the software so that it can better serve the school? Not happening: It's proprietary. Now that's how you encourage education, freedom, and critical thinking!
If that's how it's going to be--and that looks to be the case--let's just stick with paper and pencil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:10AM
Oh, and let's not forget the way many schools are forcing their students to give their names to companies like Google, who then collect data about them. Supposedly the companies won't abuse the data, but even in the unlikely case that that's true, the data collection is already intolerable. It should be outright illegal for schools to violate kids' privacy like that; either they develop their own systems or they simply don't use one. It's not just a matter of free vs proprietary software.
You talk about computer tech without considering the implications.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:51AM
I think that companies, like religions, are trying their damndest to get it into the kid's mind of how they want the kid to grow up thinking... that is they want business-friendly paradigms in place to work for peanuts, do as they are told, surrender their rights and privacy, but respect the rights and privacy of others.
Because they say so.
You know, the cognitive dissonance thingie that you want your engrams in their mind first so later stuff has the hurdle to overcome to displace.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:42AM
That is exactly why I was trying to teach the neighbor's kid algebra using GWBasic.
He already knew arithmetic, but the tedium of all that arithmetic crank turning was terribly distracting while trying to demonstrate the abstract concept of letting a variable name represent a number. GWBasic was just the tool I needed to illustrate the concept of letting some name be a number, and solve for it.
And, at the same time, illustrate how to present a math problem to a computer so it can help him.
We found an old laptop, I loaded it up with DOS, GWBasic, MathCad, Borland Eureka, VisiCalc, and a few other old-school proggies so he could use it do arithmetic - freeing him to explore what he was doing without having the tedium of actually doing it. I do not feel its necessary to learn carpentry using a brace and bit. Use the electric drill. Nothing much of value was learned spending ten minutes to get a hole made in a piece of wood anyway. The real skill was in knowing where to put the hole.
I sure would have liked to have had GWBasic available to me when I first was learning algebra, calculus, circuit analysis, and thermodynamics, just to relieve myself of the tedium of all that arithmetic. I hated thermodynamics when I first messed with it because of my intense dislike for interpolating steam and logarithm tables - now I love to work with thermodynamics, cause now I get to explore concepts and let the computer do all the messy arithmetic.
Yeh, I know its ancient technology, but I predate even that. At one time in my life, that stuff was new. And it was new after I had my degree in hand. This is an old dinosaur that lived in the day of the vacuum tube, morse code, and winding your own coils. I mean really old-school. In a way, its amazing I am still running.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:27PM
You know that GWBasic and DOS are also non-free software? Sure, you're not likely to be sued today for making copies, but that doesn't make it any less proprietary.
Besides, Python isn't harder than GWBasic when only using the basic features (no pun intended).