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posted by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:27AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:10AM (#438226)

    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

    by anubi (2828) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:51AM (#438246) Journal

    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]