Learning patterns at three years old: Contributions of a learning trajectory and teaching itinerary

Abstract

The mathematics curricula of countries such as the United States, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand have started to incorporate the teaching of algebra in early childhood education. From this perspective, our study has two objectives: (a) to design a learning trajectory and teaching itinerary introducing patterns for children between the ages of three and four years old; and (b) to apply the previously validated learning trajectory and teaching itinerary to a group of 24 children between three and four years old from Spain. The results obtained through a design-based research methodology indicate that children recognize and represent seriations that follow a simple pattern in different teaching contexts. It is concluded that the trajectory and itinerary empower a specialized educational intervention to promote the initiation of algebraic thinking in early childhood education.

Research and Pedagogies for Early Math

“…The LT approach has been research validated in multiple studies for a wide variety of math topics [32,92,[127][128][129][130][131][132][133][134][135]. In most, teachers used all the strategies in the previously described multidimensional pedagogical toolkit.…”

Exploring the development of mental rotation and computational skills in elementary students through educational robotics

“…Bee-bot has physical buttons on the device itself which can be pressed sequentially by the user to program the robot to move in specific directions. Usually, the inclusion of Bee-bot in education interventions is addressed to develop coding skills (Kazakoff, Sullivan, & Bers, 2013;Stoeckelmayr, Tesar, & Hofmann, 2011), cognitive skills related with problem-solving and cognitive flexibility (Di Lieto, et al, 2017;Diago, Arnau, & González-Calero, 2018a, 2018b, visuo-spatial abilities (Sabena, 2017) or to initiate algebraic thinking through patterning (Inchaustegui & Alsina, 2020).…”

Incorporación del álgebra temprana en Educación Infantil: un análisis desde los libros de texto

“…Diversas investigaciones informan que los estudiantes de Educación Infantil pueden desarrollar conocimientos vinculados con el álgebra temprana desde las primeras edades, adquiriendo nociones algebraicas elementales, tales como las clasificaciones de objetos, el reconocimiento de patrones repetitivos, el uso de representaciones de relaciones numéricas, entre otras (p. ej., Acosta y Alsina, 2020;Castro et al, 2017;Rittle-Johnson et al, 2019). Papic et al (2011) señalan que el pensamiento algebraico se inicia en las primeras edades a través del proceso de generalización.…”