Teaching moves and preschoolers’ arithmetical accuracy

Abstract

Several teaching moves have been suggested to support young children’s simple addition and subtraction performance, including use of a number path, directly modeling addition and subtraction, using mathematical symbols, and modifying problem difficulty. In the present study, teacher-researchers implemented an early arithmetic activity, Big Fish Story, with dyads of 3 to 4-year-old students. As part of the implementation, the teacher-researchers used these teaching moves to support young children’s in-the-moment answers to simple addition and subtraction problems. We use session-level data (n = 94 sessions) nested in dyads to examine and compare the frequency with which the use of these teaching moves are associated with two types of student responses, in order to preliminarily identify teaching moves that may support young children’s performance on simple arithmetic tasks. We conclude with implications for the field and early childhood practitioners.

Keywords:

• Addition
• arithmetic
• early childhood education
• elementary mathematics
• learning theory
• learning trajectories
• preschool
• subtraction
• teaching

Acknowledgments

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies. The findings and statements in this manuscript do not represent the views of the Foundation. Our thanks go to participating schools, teachers, and students.

Notes

1 An extensive review process was followed to identify such activities (Day-Hess & Clements, 2017); this one was a synthesis of similar activities from three sources (Baratta-Lorton, 1976; Clements & Sarama, 2013; Klein et al., 2002).

2 We noted in the method section that we also coded students’ independent accurate and inaccurate responses. Although we do not report results using those data here, given our empirical focus on students’ teacher-supported answers, we share that the varying levels of problem difficulty were associated with students’ independent accurate or inaccurate responses in separate analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was based upon work supported in part by the Heising-Simons Foundation Grant #2015-156.