The Preschool Math Landscape:
Teachers’ Knowledge of Early Math and their Instructional Emphases
Authors:
Jiwon Ban & Elida Laski
PUBLISHED in:
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
PRESENTED AT:
CDS 2024
Pasadena, CA (Poster)
MCLS 2024
Washington D.C. (Poster)
AERA 2024 Annual Meeting
Philadelphia, PA (Talk)
Project description
Acknowledging the importance of early math on later academic and non-academic outcomes, many state and federal policies in the United States have been shifting to make preschool education more accessible for young children (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2022). However, as Durkin and colleagues (2022) warned, not all preschool experiences lead to positive academic gains— what significantly matters is the quality of learning experiences. One critical aspect that influences the quality of a preschool education is teachers and to the extent that they engage in effective instruction. Unfortunately, the relation between teachers’ knowledge of a subject content (e.g., math) and their associated frequency of subject instruction in their classrooms is unclear. On one hand, handful of studies have found that higher content knowledge in teachers was positively associated with effective content instruction (e.g., Baumert et al., 2010; Krauss et al., 2020; Kunter et al., 2013). On the other hand, other bodies of work from the field of professional development and pedagogical content knowledge have shown that, despite high levels of knowledge, teachers were not engaging in developmentally appropriate math instruction (e.g., Engel, 2013; Piasta et al., 2015). Therefore, the present study was designed to contribute to the understanding of preschool teachers’ reported knowledge of early math and their reported frequency of instruction. Specifically, the study aimed to address the following: 1) whether teachers can accurately identify developmental math milestones, 2) how much math instruction they engage in, and 3) whether knowledge across early math domains (i.e., numeracy, patterning, and geometry) is associated with their amount of math instruction.
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