Picture Books as an Impetus for Kindergartners' Mathematical Thinking

Abstract

Although there is evidence that the use of picture books affects young children's achievement scores in mathematics, little is known about the cognitive engagement and, in particular, the mathematical thinking that is evoked when young children are read a picture book. The focus of the case study reported in this article is on the cognitive engagement that is facilitated by the picture books themselves and not on how this engagement is prompted by a reader. The book under investigation, Vijfde zijn [Being Fifth], is a picture book of high literary quality that was not written for the purpose of teaching mathematics. The story is about a doctor's waiting room and touches on backwards counting and spatial orientation only tacitly as part of the narrative. Four 5 year olds were each read the book by one of the authors without any questioning or probing. The reading sessions took place in school, outside the classroom. A detailed coding framework was developed for analyzing the children's utterances that provided an in-depth picture of the children's spontaneous cognitive engagement. Surprisingly, almost half the utterances were mathematics-related. The findings of the study support the idea that reading children picture books without explicit instruction or prompting has large potential for mathematically engaging children.

The writing of this article was partly supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The authors are grateful to the children and their teachers for cooperating in this study. Furthermore, they would like to thank Iris Verbruggen, their colleague at the Freudenthal Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, for testing the coding. Very special thanks go to Petra Scherer, Bielefeld University, Germany, for the enlightening discussions about how to understand the children's utterances and for checking the final coding. The authors also are obliged to Lyn English and the anonymous reviewers of this article. Their critique to two earlier versions of it stimulated the improvement and report of the study considerably. The finishing touch came from Anne Teppo, who helped non-native speakers of English with making the authors' plain writings more sophisticated.

Notes

1. The PALM project group consists of: Marja van den Heuvel-Panhuizen (Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University, the Netherlands and IQB, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany), Sylvia van den Boogaard (Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University, the Netherlands), Shuk-kwan Susan Leung (National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan), Yu-Liang Chang (Aldy) (Mingdao University, Taiwan), Petra Scherer (Department of Mathematics, Bielefeld University, Germany), and Hans Röthlisberger (Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Pädagogische Hochschule, Liestal, Switzerland). The PALM project was launched in 2005 as a small-scale satellite project of the Dutch PICO-ma project (PIcture books and COncept development MAthematics), which is part of the multidisciplinary and multimethod four-year PICO study funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) into the use of picture books as a support to kindergartners' literary, social-emotional and mathematical development.

2. In the Netherlands, education is compulsory from the age of five, but most children go to school at age four when they start kindergarten. There are two kindergarten classes (K1 and K2), which form a part of primary school.

3. Sometimes such books are also called “picture storybooks” (Reeder, 1997). Mitchell (1994) used the term “imagetext” and described it as “composite synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text” (p. 89); and Lewis (2001) emphasized the ecology of the picture book, in which pictures and words “interact ecologically, [so] that the book acts as a miniature ecosystem” (p. 48).

4. The original German title is Fünfter sein. The Dutch title is Vijfde zijn and is published by Uitgeverij Ploegsma Amsterdam. In the United Kingdom and the United States the book is called Next Please.

5. Boekwijzer is developed by the University of Tilburg, Biblion Uitgeverij, Malmberg Uitgeverij, and KPC Group (see Ghonem-Woets & Mooren, 2001).

6. The book Vijfde zijn was given an award at an international children's books fair in Bologna, was nominated for an important German award, and won an award in the Netherlands. In November 1999, it was awarded with the “Pluim van de maand.” This is a monthly award founded by some children's magazines in the Netherlands (Bobo, Ouders van Nu, and Leesgoed) and the Utrechtse Kinderboekwinkel. The award is meant for books for children between three and eight years. The pictures by Norman Junge were also singled out for an award. In 2000, the book got an award from the “Penseeljury” in the Netherlands.

7. The codes refer to the page of the book (CF = front cover, EF = endpaper front, FF = French page front, TP = title page, 1 through 16 = page 1 to 16, EB = endpaper back, CB = back cover).

8. While preparing the international continuation in the PALM project, Petra Scherer discovered that the (original) German version has the ordinal number approach; for example, where the Dutch text reads “Now only four,” the German text reads “Being fourth.” Later on we found more remarkable differences between the different versions of the book, and even the English translation differs in the editions for the United Kingdom and the United States. Of course, differences like these can influence the effects of the picture book and need further research.

9. See Note 7.