ModSu: Welcome everyone to tonight’s live chat.
Mark: My major project is testing 20,000 children of who 13,500 are part of our longitudinal birth cohort study – this allows us to understand all of the factors that influence a child’s outcome. We did our first school sweep when they were 4-5 years and now we are back when they are 7-8 years. But we have all of the routine data being harvested continually.
Rebecca: My interest is primarily on early years learning and attention, and I’ve focused on maths learning in particular. I’m especially interested in how young children learn the meaning of number symbols and what foundational numeracy skills are important to establish in the early years.
Katie: My research is in maths education. In particular in how spatial thinking influences maths learning.
ModSu: What do you think are the most important foundational numeracy skills to establish in the early years?
Rebecca: From the research, it seems the symbolic numerical skills are pretty important. But so are spatial skills! @mickleja has been working on improving early maths education in her board and might have some insight as to what seems to matter in the classroom.
@mickleja: We’ve certainly learned a lot from being part of this project with Rebecca- I agree that the symbolic numerical skills are important. We are spending a lot of time playing games with symbolic and non symbolic representations. Our results have also shown us spatial skills are a need among our early years learners. Number lines are a powerful model to helps kids visualize mentally- we find it’s something teachers need to explore more.
ModSu: Are there any particular resources you use to encourage children to use spatial skills in maths?
@mickleja: We are currently working with some of our kindergarten teams using a resource called Taking Shape that looks specifically at spatial reasoning in the early years. It’s a wonderful resource.
Rebecca: here is the link: https://www.pearsoncanadaschool.com/index.cfm?locator=PS2uLd
@mickleja: The activities are great but even more it the teacher learning embedded throughout- it supports teachers in really noticing and naming the learning and making information instructional informed.
Katie: I have just taken a look. It looks great. I have read a lot of other work Zach Hawes has done.
@mickleja: The feedback from teachers is extremely positive- the games are engaging but they really do love the learning it is providing them. We are still in the early stages, so we don’t have any data to support changes in student thinking. However, I can tell you spatial reasoning is being discussed in class more than ever, so that hopefully will lead to something positive! They find the activities easy to engage students with.
@mickleja: I’d love to hear more about Katie’s work on spatial thinking and maths.
Katie: Gladly 🙂 My research has focused on what types of spatial thinking might be important for different aspects of maths. So for example we have found that spatial scaling seems to have a particularly important role for a number of maths measures. We also found that mental rotation is important for younger children. Based on this we have designed some spatial training videos – hoping that improving spatial skills will have knock-on effects on maths! This data collection is just finished but the results are looking promising 🙂 We are also looking into spatial language and its role for maths learning – again only provisional results so far, but it looks like spatial language is also an important predictor of maths achievement. So mirroring the messages in “Taking Space” that spatial thinking is certainly important! And often under emphasised!
@mickleja: This is so interesting – I think it is definitely an area of mathematics that has not been focused on enough – especially in the early years.
Katie: I completely agree. I also think it is an area that children find really enjoyable!
ModSu: Mark, are spatial skills and maths measures included as part of your large-scale study?
Mark: We have all the children’s maths scores from school and national tests. WRT ‘spatial skills’ – this is a broad construct and I think it is important to know how it is being operationalised. We do have a paper just about to come out in psych sci that shows a relationship between children’s interceptive timing abilities and their performance on national maths scores. But yes – we have a number of tests that tap into the ‘spatial’ domain.
ModSu: Thank you everyone for taking part, and enjoy the rest of your half term break.