Episode 61: Deciphering the Complexities of Early Math Education

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Welcome to another episode of K12 Education Untangled. My name is Dr. Kim Fields, former corporate manager turned educational researcher and advocate, and I'm the host of this podcast. I got into this space after dealing with some frustrating interactions with school educators and administrators, as well as experiencing the microdiscriminations that I faced as an African American mom raising my two kids who were in the public school system. I really wanted to understand how teachers were trained and what the research provided about the challenges of the public education system. Once I gained the information and the insights that I needed, I was then equipped to be able to successfully support my children in their educational progress. If you're looking to find out more about current information and issues in education that could affect you or your children, then you're in the right place. Thanks for tuning in today. I know that staying informed about K12 education trends and topics important to you, so keep listening.

On today's episode, I'll be discussing why math literacy is critical and whether America is failing math. Math knowledge is strongly predictive of later math and reading skills, which are critical for academic achievement. Proficiency in math is important for academic, economic, and life success. Greater academic achievement in math is related to college completion, higher earnings, and better health decisions. I'm going to address the second part of my opening statement here. First and I will cut to the chase. America is not failing math per se, but it is failing to teach important math concepts to young children, especially toddlers, pre K, and kindergartners. This may be due to two a preschool teacher's reluctance to teach math because of his or her own insecurities about the topic and because parents don't really feel that math knowledge at an early age is an important enough concept to reinforce at home when focusing on literacy. The fact is that math literacy influences reading literacy. Let's dive in. There's evidence to suggest that early math skills are highly predictive of later academic achievement. Yet there are disparities in early math skills among young children. These early math skills can be important predictors of later achievement in math as well as reading and science. Math literacy includes ranking numbers, putting them in sequence, counting and number word identification, as well as telling time. There are two important factors that that contribute to early math development patterning and spatial skills. Repeating patterning and spatial skills are related Although repeating patterning skills are a unique predictor of math knowledge and growth in pre kindergarten children. Patterning skills include the ability to notice and to use predictable sequences such as such as a predictable array of shapes or sounds or functional relations between two variables. With young children, the focus in math education is typically on skills with repeating patterns such as circle, circle, square, circle circle, square. Spatial skills encompass cognitive skills related to visual imagery and mental manipulation of spatial information. These skills are often developed when young children play with blocks, puzzles, and board games three to five times per week. Specifically, spatial skills are core cognitive skills and include the ability to imagine and mentally transform spatial information, the ability to copy and distinguish shapes from other shapes, including symbols, and the ability to hold the locations of different objects like landmarks and working memory. Spatial skills are present in infancy and continue to develop throughout childhood. Spatial skills influence math knowledge because mathematical thinking is supported by spatial representations. A common example of this is when a child solves math problems, such as addition problems that involve carrying spatial assembly. Skill at age three was predictive of math knowledge concurrently and two years later. The visual spatial working memory at age four and a half predicted math achievement through grade three, controlling for reading achievement and executive function skills. Even spatial skills in infancy may be predictive of math knowledge at age 4. Young children's repeating patterning skills become systematically more sophisticated in preschool and kindergarten. Often, children first learn to read with simple alternating patterns such as red blue pattern, and then learn to identify patterns with three and four item units. By the end of preschool, many children were able to identify the missing item in a pattern, make an exact replica of a model pattern, and continue an existing pattern by at least one unit of repeat repeating. Patterning skills support math knowledge because identifying, extending, and describing patterns in objects and numbers are core to mathematical thinking. Both accounting and arithmetic principles describe generalizations of predictable sequences. Working with repeating patterns provides early opportunities to identify and describe prevention predictable sequences without requiring specific math knowledge. Repeating patterning skill at the end of pre kindergarten was a unique predictor of 5th and 6th grade math achievement, and repeating patterning skill at the end of preschool was also predicted of different fifth grade math topics, including algebra and geometry. Proficiency in math is important for academic, economic, and life success. Greater academic achievement in math helps to make better health decisions, and individual differences in math knowledge tend to emerge in preschool and are fairly stable. General math knowledge in the final year of preschool and kindergarten typically predict math achievement across primary and secondary school. In most preschools in the United States, math only accounts for about 25% of instructional time, although this is substantially more time than the 14% of instructional time spent on math in most first grade classrooms in the early 2000s. Parents in a 2018 study produced in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly Journal indicated that they provided some support of early math development through numeracy, spatial and patterning activities with stronger emphasis on numeracy than on pattern and space. Parent support was rarely linked to the child's skills except in numeracy support related to concurrent numeracy knowledge. Parents belief in especially about their child's academic abilities may influence components of the early home math environment. The home numeracy environment includes parents providing support for numeracy skills at home such as counting objects together. Math knowledge is strongly predictive of later math and reading skills which are critical for academic achievement. The early home math environment encompasses both numeracy and and non numeracy aspects of that environment because math knowledge is more than numeracy knowledge even in early childhood. Math knowledge also includes repeating pattern and spatial thinking and these early math skills need to be supported in the home. During early childhood, numeracy activities focus on numbers including count, words, names, etc. Informal numeracy practices that are embedded in everyday activities such as reading number related storybooks and playing card and board games. Parents most often provide formal numeracy activities frequently at home and these include daily or weekly engagement and counting and using number words. Number talk like counting and naming numerals accounted for over a third of parents total talk to their 3 to 5 year olds during play. Home numeracy activities may be frequent for young children, but they occur less often than non numeracy activities. Parents reported in this study that supporting their kindergarteners literacy skills, for example helping their child read or print words several days a week, but numeracy activities like learning simple psalms or asking about quantities were only supported on a weekly or monthly basis. Parents also engage in spatial talk with their young children by using words such as between and below to describe locations and positions of objects and people with their preschoolers. Parents of three to six year old children indicated that they used spatial location words like over and on as often as three to five times a week. The use of spatial words accounted for 6% of total words spoken when children were between 20 and 46 months old. Parents who were not competent in their own math skills did devalue the importance of math for themselves and find the subject uninteresting usually provide infrequent support of their child's math learning at home compared to parents with more positive academic beliefs about themselves. Likewise, parents who believe their children have low interest and low ability in math are thought to provide infrequent math experiences compared to parents who believe their children or are more interested in and able to engage in math activities. One of the reasons that parents may emphasize numeracy activities over other math skills with their preschoolers is because the parents may not be aware that non numeracy skills are part of math knowledge. Parents may not recognize a broader range of math knowledge as being relevant for their young children. In fact, it may surprise you that repeating patterning skill is an important early math skill or that spatial skills support math knowledge. If home spatial activities with parents typically take the form of free play, those experiences may not effectively support spatial skills. Parental beliefs, including their beliefs about the importance of literacy and math skills, as well as their perceived responsibility for teaching their children reading, math and language skills, relate to home literacy and numeracy activities in distinctive ways. Formal math activities like those with the explicit purpose of teaching children math concepts fostered formal math skills, for example like counting, identification, etc. Whereas informal activities are those that include map content incidents promoted informal or non symbolic math skills such as addition and subtraction skills. Several studies have shown that parents from low SES backgrounds engage in activities that support their children's numeracy skills, learning less frequently than their peers from high SES backgrounds. SES differences have been documented to show the frequency of engaging in specific home math activities such as playing board games or puzzles. On the other hand, other studies have observed no difference in the frequency of math activities by ses, and several studies have in fact observed negative associations, meaning that the practices of utilizing math activities in the home are more frequent among families of low SES compared to families of high ses. These mixed results just indicate that the focus of these studies varied depending on what the researchers were looking for in the home numeracy environment. As with reading literacy, parental beliefs and attitudes toward math correlated with the parents expectations for their children's academic success with strong links between expectations and behaviors. In this 2018 study, parents beliefs about the importance of children's math skills were largely unrelated to their numeracy activities at home, while parents belief about their own responsibility for teaching their children math or positively related to participating in math activities at home. Many parents may believe that math skills are important but might be better off left to their children's teachers. Have you had a chance to check.

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Toddlers who struggle with vocabulary are at risk of developing persistent math difficulties and boosting a child's reading skills and ensuring access to preschool may be some valid ways to head off those math struggles. According to a Penn State University researcher, Paul Morgan, there are certain characteristics that a toddler can display at 24 months that can be predictive of math difficulties when they are four or five years old. Further, students who have math difficulties at third, fifth and eighth grades were generally also struggling with math in kindergarten. Early difficulties in math don't just work themselves out on their own. Children need support to address them. Literacy and language related skills are also important and so is self regulation, the ability to stay on task and to be persistent, all issues that are present with students who have math struggles. Additionally, low socioeconomic status has been shown to be predictive of math difficulties along with a history of reading and behavioral problems. And as I indicated earlier, there's mixed results on SES status as far as numeracy activities in the homes. SES is typically used as one of the background variables in many studies, yet the results tend to be mixed. Here are some action steps that you can take regarding this topic. You can incorporate the following activities to reinforce math skills at home. 1. Mapping activities such as reciting numbers, singing counting songs, or recognizing printed numbers. 2. Operational activities such as simple adding or subtracting, telling time, using clocks or calendars, and measuring. 3. Numeracy games, such as any one of the many commercially available number related games that you can play with your child. Researchers found that basic mapping number activities like reciting numbers or recognizing printed numbers were not associated with later math growth after controlling for a child's initial math skills. However, the time preschoolers spent playing more advanced operational number games like simple adding or subtracting numbers with their parents predicted their growth and math performance by the end of kindergarten. In fact, frequent home activities were linked to better skills in comparing numbers and arithmetic fluency. Remember to talk to your young child about math and numbers because this helps to develop a much higher math knowledge by the start of preschool. Home math activities can include such things as talking about money when shopping as well as the math that's used in measuring, for example when following a recipe. Other activities can include utilizing number activity books and card games. More formal math activities should include basic counting and number identification skills. A website called Bedtime Math provides math stories and puzzles for parents to use as a regular part of a child's day. Just like a nightly bedtime story. If you're interested in learning more about the ways to integrate math in your young child's daily life, I have a checklist that highlights five recommendations on the math skills your young child should master. You can find that checklist under resources@www.liberationthrougheducation.com Here are this episode's takeaways. Individual differences in math knowledge tend to emerge in preschool and are fairly stable. General math knowledge in the final year of preschool and kindergarten typically predict math achievement across primary and secondary school. In most preschools in the United States, math math only accounts for about 25% of instructional time. Young children's exposure to math in the home is less prevalent because parents tend to focus more on literacy than on supporting math concepts. There are two important factors that contribute to early math patterning and spatial skills. Repeating patterning and spatial skills are related Although repeating patterning skills are a unique predictor of math knowledge and growth in pre kindergarten children, as with reading literacy, parental beliefs and attitudes toward math correlated with the parents expectations for their children's academic success. With strong links between expectations and behaviors, a child's interest in mathematics arises depending entirely on the environment provided by the child's parents or caregivers. Additionally, if genetic preferences are strong, then a certain portion of children would like mathematics and would be interested in the subject. If mathematics play is practiced in a wide range of areas, efforts at home will be more effective than those at school. Therefore, simple mathematics play that parents could practice at home is very effective in nurturing non cognitive skills, those social and emotional skills, as well as cognitive skills such as reading and math. If this is the type of subject matter and discussion that resonates with you, please follow my podcast on whatever service you're listening to this also, I'd love to hear from you, so please leave me a rating, a review, or a comment on Apple or podchaser if you like this podcast, the best way to support me and help me grow it is by leaving a review. This helps my rankings and entices other people to listen to the show and share this episode with anyone that you think would find it valuable. Be sure to tell your friends, family and community about my podcast. Additionally, connect with me on Instagram and Facebook with the handle kimjfields. Or we reach out to me with a specific question by sending me an email to kimberationthrougheducation.com thanks for listening today. I hope you'll come back for more K12 educational discussions with even more exciting topics to untangle be sure to stay tuned on the next episode. I'll be discussing more classroom tech trends to be aware of. Until next time. Aim to learn something new every day. Love my show. Consider being a regular subscriber. You can subscribe for as little as $3 per month. Just go to HTTP podcast support. There's no contractual obligation. You can cancel at any time. If you choose to subscribe, I'll give you a special shout out thanking you in an upcoming episode. Remember, that's HTTPs tinyurl.com podcast support to subscribe.