Exploring adults’ awareness of and suggestions for early childhood numerical activities

Abstract

This study focuses on adults who are neither preschool teachers nor professional caregivers and investigates their beliefs regarding the importance of engaging young children with numerical activities. It also examines the types of numerical activities adults report having observed children engaging with, as well as the types of activities they propose as a way for promoting counting, enumerating, recognizing number symbols, and number composition and decomposition. Findings showed that participants believed to a great extent that engaging young children with numerical activities is important. Most reported that they had observed children engaging with at least some numerical activity. In general, participants relayed more activities and more detailed activities when suggesting activities for each competency, than they did when reporting observed activities. Findings also suggested a need to enhance adults' knowledge regarding the necessity to promote verbal counting, separate from object counting, as well as to increase adults' awareness of number composition and decomposition. For mathematics educators wishing to plan workshops for adults, this study offers a method for investigating adults' knowledge of early numerical activities, as well as a starting point with which to plan appropriate workshops.

Can I Teach? Assimilation Of Early Childhood Arithmetic Concepts Among Preschool Paraeducators

“…The role of ECA teaching is to provide children with experiences that would help them reach an overall understanding of numbers and develop flexible ways of working with them, beginning with an intuitive and informal encounter with numbers, followed by a formal and symbolic understanding of the various representations of numbers as required at school (Baroody et al, 2006). Therefore adults, including early-childhood teachers, have an important role in the mathematical development of young children (Levenson et al, 2021). Studies have indicated a relation between the development of children's mathematical knowledge and the specific mathematical discourse that their teachers conducted with them (Gjicali et al, 2019;Purpura et al, 2017;Uscianowski et al, 2020).…”

Promoting adults’ knowledge for engaging young children with numerical activities.

“…In this paper we present part a large research project that aimed to investigate adults' knowledge and beliefs regarding playful mathematics learning during the early years (e.g., Levenson et al, 2022). As part of the project, we planned and implemented an intervention with adults that focused on enhancing adults' knowledge of playful numerical activities.…”