November 16, 2016

“We are trying to get at how families think about math, and we want to see how we might see different values around math and reading. As a society, it is acceptable for people to say, ‘I am not a math person,’ as opposed to, ‘I am not a reading person.”

-Amy Claessens, Assistant Professor, Harris Public Policy

Math is an integral part of our lives, whether we are shopping, cooking or mowing the lawn. But for a variety of reasons, it is not always considered as knowledge as necessary as literacy. Each year, students arrive at kindergarten knowing their letters and even reading, but few enter school understanding what numbers really are or doing simple operations. What is more, after getting to school, many do not progress in mathematics as far as they can.

“Schools aren’t doing enough to teach math, especially to young children,” explained Assistant Professor Amy Claessens. "They underestimate what children can do, they repeat a lot of material, and recent research has shown that there is a lot of anxiety around teaching math. But it’s not just schools, parents aren’t doing enough to teach and prioritize math.”

Fortunately, Claessens is working on this problem as part of a $5 million grant to the Development and Research in Early Mathematics Educations (DREME) Network, a collaboration of researchers in diverse disciplinary groups from around the country. The project is predicated on recent findings that show early math skills are an important predictor of later academic success and that children who come to school with low math skills continue to lag behind peers as they get older.

Claessens is looking at two aspects of early childhood mathematical education. First, she is attempting to improve the ways in which parents and other caregivers engage in math with preschool-aged children by increasing talk about math and the number of mathematical tasks done with them. “Many times, adults don’t realize when they are doing math – like when they are counting socks from the laundry – so they do more rote memorization of numbers without teaching understanding.”

Last year as a first step in this study, Claessens and her team provided different types of manipulatives to families and listened to determine which ones enhanced math talk. This fall they will be piloting a program with approximately 60 children in home-based childcare in Illinois where they will use games, books and activities to maximize math encounters and make it easier for parents and caregivers to do math with the kids. They will also follow up with special recording devices the children will wear to see if math talk increases in the households.

“We are trying to get at how families think about math and we want to see how we might see different values around math and reading,” Claessens added. “As a society, it is acceptable for people to say, ‘I am not a math person,’ as opposed to, ‘I am not a reading person.”

Claessens is also studying the relationship between math and executive function – the ability to plan, organize and complete tasks. Math requires a lot of working memory, but it also demands that the children doing it be able to slow down their thinking and follow rules. She is trying to determine if executive function can be enhanced, which could improve the math, or whether the math can be improved without it.  “Trying to disentangle these two elements is a little tricky.”

Part of the reason the disentangling is difficult is because executive function is difficult to measure. Fortunately, everyone involved in the executive function arm of the DREME Network is working together to set guidelines for their work. Claessens’ team is developing games and activities that have different executive functions demands for kids and measuring how they respond to challenges.

Two postdoctoral scholars working with Claessens are currently piloting a program in Chicago with a puzzle game they created. The game forces children to ignore extraneous information, which changes with each round, with the notion that repeated practice will lead to executive function improvement in that area. The game is largely autodidactic, so introducing it into classrooms would not put any additional demands on teachers but will simply change the materials available to students. They are looking forward to introducing the game into 26 pre-K classrooms in Nashville soon.

The members of the DREME hope to ultimately change the way parents, caregivers, teachers and even kids think about being math people and doing math. “While our society now talks a lot about STEM, we are not talking about math to young kids and making it as much a part of the conversation as literacy is. We need to stop underestimating kids and teaching them what they already know. We need to use the skills they have to move them forward,” Claessens said.

– Robin I. Mordfin