Math knowledge at kindergarten entry strongly predicts children’s math learning in later school years, and the achievement gap associated with family economic circumstances exists before children enter school. If we want all children to do well in school we need to support children’s math learning during the preschool years.
Teaching all children effectively in preschool is challenging. In any given classroom, the teacher needs to provide appropriate math activities for children who are likely to vary widely in their math skills. Consider, for example, children who can count to 10 by rote but do not yet understand what those count words mean. The teacher might give them objects to count, to create a link between the counting words and the number of objects. Other children might understand the meanings of the number words and be ready to compare the quantity of different sets of objects or to determine the number of objects when some are added or taken away.
To help teachers address the challenge of matching instruction to children’s skills, our interdisciplinary team of developmental scientists, statisticians, and early math education specialists at the University of Chicago partnered with expert practitioners to develop a preschool math professional learning system called On Track Math (OTM). The OTM system provides teachers with information about foundational math skills and about each child’s learning of these skills. Teachers administer a brief formative assessment consisting of tasks drawn from developmental science research to each child 2-3 times over the school year. Examples of tasks include giving a stuffed penguin a specified number of plastic fish and placing plastic shapes together to fit into an outline of a larger shape.
The assessment gives teachers a window into children’s math thinking that helps them tailor their instruction to each child’s level of understanding. The specific assessment that each child completes is targeted to their individual skill level, maximizing the efficiency of the teacher’s assessment time. This OTM formative assessment tool is accompanied by data displays and instructional planning resources, including recommended pedagogical strategies and playful, engaging instructional activities that are aligned with the child’s skills levels. Teachers also participate in four professional learning workshops (totaling 11 hours) that support their use of the assessment tool and build their knowledge about foundational math skills and how to advance them.
In two separate studies (Raudenbush et al., 2020; Levine et al., under review), we randomized preschool classrooms from a range of program types—from Head Start programs to tuition-based preschool programs to home daycares—to either the OTM condition or to a control condition for one school year. Within each preschool, we implemented OTM in some classrooms, while other (control) classrooms continued to teach math in their usual way.
At the end of the year, we assessed children’s numerical, spatial, and verbal skills, as well as teachers’ knowledge about the development of early math skills. In both studies, children in the OTM classrooms had higher levels of numerical thinking than children in control classrooms. In the second study, children in OTM classrooms also scored higher on spatial thinking than children in control classrooms, likely because the spatial measure we used in the second study (comprehension of spatial/relational language) was better aligned with the foundational skills that were the focus of the OTM system. An unexpected positive finding in both studies was that verbal comprehension skills grew more in OTM children than children in the control condition. This was surprising because teachers did not explicitly learn about teaching verbal skills though OTM, except in the context of supporting students’ mathematical vocabulary. The benefit to verbal comprehension as well as to math skills is important, as it shows that the time teachers took to support children’s math learning did not take away from another important area of learning, and in fact benefitted it. We also found that teachers in the OTM condition had more knowledge about early math development than teachers in the control condition, and this knowledge was related to children’s math learning.
Together, our findings indicate that an intervention that supports teacher knowledge of foundational math skills and helps them assess children’s knowledge of these skills and tailor instruction to children’s learning needs is a promising approach to ensuring that children enter kindergarten with strong foundational math skills.
For further information about OTM, contact Susan Levine (s-levine@uchicago.edu) and Janet Sorkin (jesorkin@uchicago.edu).
References
Levine, S., Foley, A., Goldin-Meadow, S., Hernandez, M., Leslie, D., Sorkin, J.E., & Raudenbush., S. (under review). Adaptive Assessment and Instruction in Preschool Math: Replication, Extension, and Generalization. Located at https://cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/publications-2/
Raudenbush, S. W., Hernandez, M., Goldin-Meadow, S., Carrazza, C., Foley, A., Leslie, D., Sorkin, J. E., & Levine, S. C. (2020). Longitudinally adaptive assessment and instruction increase numerical skills of preschool children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(45). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002883117
