Week 2, 11th September 2013 + Portfolio 4.2

How Do Parents Support Preschoolers' Numeracy Learning Experiences at Home?

This reading was selected as I thought that research into children’s home lives would be a way to see (in a qualitative manner) how children use / apply numeracy concepts in their play and everyday lives.

The main argument was that the authors felt that the parents of the children in the study did not sufficiently challenge their children from a numeracy perspective. The children who were challenged by their parents with more advanced activities performed better in their ‘numeracy scores’.

A finding that connected with my previous understanding was that parents did not always know if there was a mathematical component to the activity they were undertaking, and tended to guess. The connection with an article that I had read previously (I don’t recall the name) was that whilst pre-service teachers are able to complete numeracy tasks with accuracy, they often aren’t able to discuss the numeracy concepts behind these. This could be an area of future research for me.

One criticism I have of this research is that 32% of the children surveyed had at least one parent who was a teacher. I couldn’t say with certainty but I would imagine this is higher than the average population. Therefore the research results would be biased to some degree.

The implication I think this has for me as a future educator is to be brave and challenge my students with more complex numeracy than perhaps I otherwise would have done.

Update: 21/11/2013

I have chosen to update this reading reflection in order to align it with Outcome 4.2: Describes how parents, peers & communities may see, feel & shape young children’s early literacy & numeracy experiences.

In the reflection above I note that parents & educators (the latter being part of a community of learners around the child) may be unknowingly disadvantaging children through a lack of concrete knowledge of mathematical concepts. Indeed, I think this is a challenging area as I believe we're not only looking at a basic knowledge of concepts but actually fluency. The reason for this is that these concepts are basically hidden in most cases. For example, no children's book I can think of would state on the page 'THIS PAGE INCLUDES ORDINAL NUMBERS". Thus, the parent or educator not only needs to know about ordinal numbers, but recognise that an element of the situation contains ordinal numbers.

I wouldn't want to say that this situation will never change, but I believe that change in this area will be slow because, as I have heard in  'EDUC3622 Thinking and Working Mathematically', many adults have had negative experiences with mathematics in schooling and thus avoid it where possible. So, the weight on the shoulders of present educators is to provide positive experiences so that future generations may have less fear of numeracy and then gain greater fluency.

In response to the question from Jesse below, I have read (Watson, 2011) that an area that is presently underrepresented in the Australian F-2 curriculum is Statistics & Probability, currently assessed as representing only around 20% of the interest and effort invested by educators.

Looking at the EYLF, I note that statistics is not mentioned at all, whilst 'data' is mentioned once (outside of glossaries and definitions).

So, if we are to challenge young children in terms of complex numeracy, statistics and data may be a good place to start.


Key words:

Parents, home life, teachers, complex numeracy, challenge

References:

Skwarchuk, S. (2009). How do parents support preschoolers' numeracy learning experiences at home? Early Childhood Education Journal, 37(3), 189-197. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/61841932?accountid=10910

Watson, J. (2011). Professor's Page: Statistical Literacy - Connectivity for the Australian Curriculum.Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom, 16 (3), p. 18. Retrieved from: http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=331773981647395;res=IELHSS [Accessed: 18 Nov 2013].

Handy Manny and the Emergent Literacy Technology Toolkit

I chose this article as I was looking for information with pragmatic and practical applications for early childhood literacy.

There were a number of general findings in the article. When using larger LCD screens, it was suggested that students learned significantly more than when the same information was presented on smaller screens.

Further, the article discussed the results of a study of young children using Powerpoint. The children created a project and were able to:

§  reflect on their learning in a complex way,

§  explain their thinking and reflect on their experience, and

§  express what they had learned in multiple ways.

This was particularly interesting to me as I am a proponent of technology use in early childhood settings. This reinforces my need to encourage it as I found that many educators on my placement were not interested in this aspect of teaching, for literacy purposes or otherwise.

Reference:

Hourcade, J. J., Parette, H. P., Boeckmann, N., & Blum, C. (2010). Handy manny and the emergent literacy technology toolkit.Early Childhood Education Journal, 37(6), 483-491. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10643-010-0377-1