What do preschool teachers do to teach mathematics? A study in chilean classrooms

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. Early math skills play an important role in the school performance of children, causing substantial differences in future learning gains. Specifically, the tasks proposed by preschool teachers have been shown to have had a differential impact on the development of children’s mathematical thinking. In this way, it is important to determine the type and extent of math tasks teachers employ, using a sample of preschoolers from Latin America, where these topics have been less studied. Consequently, this article explores the different math tasks proposed by early childhood educators in Chilean preschool classrooms. METHOD. We analyzed 31 videos of Chilean preschool classrooms to identify the mathematical tasks implemented and the time invested in each. RESULTS. The results show that, in the observed classrooms, the educators favored numerical content tasks, such as number recognition and number-quantity correspondence, instead of those tasks that required the understanding of math processes. DISCUSSION. The results show that the mathematical tasks that were present in the observed preschool Chilean classrooms focused on mechanical and procedural work, tasks that hinder – to a certain extent – the development of more complex mathematical thinking.