DREME at the 2024 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting

Changes Across Grades Pre-K–2 in Math Instruction

Central to P-3 alignment is continuity in the type as well as the quality of instruction. Significant discontinuity in how math is taught–children’s experience of “doing” math–can confuse students and reduce the amount of time they are productively involved in learning math. Building out from the previous presentation focused on kindergarten, one of the questions this presentation addresses is how math instruction changed across grades and the mathematical experiences students had as they moved from preschool through the early elementary grades. Math instruction should change in ways that are developmentally appropriate, as children develop their understanding and skills, but it can also change in ways that are unnecessary or developmentally inappropriate. There are also aspects of math instruction (e.g., asking questions, listening to determine what children know) that should be present in all grades.

To be able to document the nuances of teaching strategies and children’s learning experiences, we developed a new observation tool that assesses the quality and coherence of math instruction. Over four years as students moved from pre-k to second grade, we observed 106 math classrooms in the fall, winter, and spring with the exception of the fourth year when they were only observed in fall and winter due to the pandemic. Fifteen observers conducted the observations, with six involved for more than one year of the study. Each year, observers went through training and needed to reach a reliability threshold of at least 80% double-coding classrooms with an expert observer before beginning observations. We observed math activities that occurred during their regular math instruction period, coding teacher questioning (i.e., whether teachers asked closed- or open-ended questions), whether teachers built on students’ thinking, amount of differentiation, level of student engagement, student math practices (e.g., students explaining their reasoning, talking with other students about math), and the content level of the math (below, on, or above grade level). Observers also took detailed notes that allowed us to explore what specifically children experienced during math instruction in these classrooms.

Findings of grade-level comparisons revealed that some aspects of math instruction stayed fairly consistent across grades (e.g., student engagement, differentiation). On average, student engagement was relatively high across grades. Differentiation, however, was low across all grades, illustrating how classrooms can be coherent across grades in a way we would want to change. Some instructional practices changed across grades in ways that were developmentally appropriate (e.g., giving students more opportunities to explain their reasoning), and others changed in ways that were unnecessary and sometimes inappropriate (e.g., decreasing the content level of the math, spending more time reviewing content, and increasing aspects of traditional didactic instruction as students were older). We will discuss the implications for these differences in coherence for students’ math experiences and learning as they proceed through elementary school.

DREME Presenters: Kelley Durkin, Vanderbilt University; Dale C. Farran, Vanderbilt University; Luke Rainey, Vanderbilt University; Stone Dawson, Vanderbilt University