Page 28 - UD Research Magazine Vol5-No1

Teaching number sense
by Alison Burris
Think how difficult math would be for a kindergartner who can’t tell you that three pennies represent the number three, or that a set with five cookies has two more than a set with three cookies.
A guide to better math skills
Thus, Jordan, along with her colleague Nancy Dyson, a researcher and doctoral graduate in the School of Education,
set out to develop a new curriculum
for preschoolers called Number Sense Interventions. This user-friendly guide
is designed to help teachers strengthen young students’ foundational math skills.
Teachers get 24 scripted lessons, each 30 minutes long with interventions
that are fun, simple and highly effective at boosting key math skills related to number concepts, number relations and number operations.
Proven to improve young children’s number sense, these engaging lessons help resolve early math difficulties before first grade and start students on the path to long-term success in elementary school and beyond.
The guide is based on research pub- lished in 2012 in the Journal of Educa- tional Psychology that Jordan conducted with UD colleagues Dyson, Prof. Joseph Glutting and education doctoral graduates Brenna Hassinger-Das
and Casey Irwin. The team evaluated children
from five Delaware elementary schools
that serve primarily low-income students.
While the tasks seem simple, many children, particularly those from low- income families, come to school without such basic number competencies.
“Even students with ample intellectual capacity may experience weaknesses in developing number sense, leading to serious academic consequences,” says Nancy C. Jordan, professor in the Univer- sity of Delaware’s School of Education. “If students do not develop foundational math in elementary and middle school, they are less likely to develop essential skills to master concepts such as algebra, which will hinder their success in high school and college.”
Jordan recently completed a five-year grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health to study students at risk for math difficulties and to develop interventions to help kindergartners develop number sense.
“In earlier studies, we found that mathematical difficulties, such as core deficiencies in number sense, were evident even as a child entered kindergarten,” says
Jordan, who has been working in this area since 1998. “This had a direct impact on growth in formal math between first and third grades—and consequently on their level of proficiency on the Delaware state tests at the end of third grade.”
While the education community has embraced early interventions to improve reading, fewer efforts have been made
to explore the potential benefits of early interventions in mathematics.
Tips for boosting your child’s math skills
What can parents and teachers do to help pre-schoolers become math thinkers? Try these tried-and-true approaches from Number Sense Interventions:
6. Play board games, such as Chutes and Ladders, that move along a number list.
If you believe your child has a math disability, you should request that he or she be screened with a measure of early number competencies.
For more ideas, be sure to check out the “What Works Clearinghouse” at the Institute for Education Sciences: www.ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc.
1. Make numbers and counting fun
and part of your child's everyday world.
2. Count everyday objects. “How many books do we have in the pile?”
3. Recognize quantities of 5 or less instantly without counting.
4. Think about number partners. For exam- ple, 5 is made up of 3 and 2, or 4 and 1.
5. Count on from a cardinal value (one, two, etc.) to emphasize that the next number in the sequence is always one more than the previous number (n + 1 rule).
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