by Chuck Green | CYFS
For some young children, learning the basics of 1-2-3 can be easy as A-B-C, but because early numeracy skills often receive less attention than early literacy skills, children who lag in number comprehension may fall behind academically in kindergarten and beyond.
Keting Chen, human sciences doctoral student in the Department of Child, Youth and Family Studies, is exploring how home and child care environments are associated with preschoolers’ numeracy skills — the ability to understand and work with numbers — and how parents and teachers can ensure those skills are where they need to be once the children enter school. Chen is also one of the research assistants for the AIR@NE grant.
Funded by a one-year grant from the Buffett Early Childhood Institute’s Graduate Scholars program, Chen’s dissertation project is designed to identify factors at home and in child care environments that predict children’s numeracy skills, and how the two settings jointly contribute to early learners’ number comprehension.
“Research indicates young children’s numeracy skills are very important in predicting later academic success,” she said. “We have found significant, individual differences among students upon entry into kindergarten, and I’m interested to learn why these differences occur so early.”
Chen aims to identify important aspects of early childhood numeracy environments, such as parents’ and teachers’ early math knowledge, and frequency of numeracy activities. Her study will include 120 preschool-aged children — and their parents and teachers — with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
Parents and teachers will be asked to report how often they do numeracy activities, and children’s numeracy skills will be assessed. Researchers will use video observations of parent-child interactions during those activities to examine both home and childcare environments and their associations with children’s numeracy development.
“Video observations help us better understand what numeracy activities look like — games, reading, cooking or other math concepts embedded in those activities,” Chen said.
Read more:
https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/study-explores-ways-to-bolster-early-childhood-numeracy-skills/