Pre-K

Learning trajectories in early mathematics instruction have received increasing attention from policymakers, educators, curriculum developers, and researchers. They are generally deemed useful for guiding curriculum standards, instructional planning, and assessment. However, the specific contributions of learning trajectories to education and children’s learning are unclear. We review research over the last five years to describe what is known and what still needs to be learned about methods of development, refinement, and validation of the goals, developmental progressions, and instruction of learning trajectories in early mathematics and possible advantages and disadvantages in the educational application of learning trajectories.

Mathematics is a core component of cognition. Unfortunately, most young children and teachers cannot access research-based early childhood mathematics resources. Building on a quarter-century of research, we are developing and evaluating an innovative, integrated, intelligent, and interactive system of technologies based on empirically validated learning trajectories that provide the best personal and digital tools for assessing and supporting children’s mathematics learning.

The general aim of the research was to conduct a rare test of the efficacy of hypothetical learning progressions (HLPs) and a basic assumption of basing instruction on HLPs, namely teaching each successive level is more efficacious than skipping lower levels and teaching the target level directly. The specific aim was evaluating whether counting-based cardinality concepts unfold in a stepwise manner.

Do you want to learn more about complex ecological systems, nature-culture relations, and field-based science? These storyline frameworks are designed for educators working in a variety of places (community-based organizations of all types, homes, schools). Each framework provides in-depth, research-based information about its topic, as well as a variety of appendices that help educators put their new learning into practice. These include vignettes that show the ideas in practice and a self-assessment that educators can use to reflect on their current and future thinking and practice.

Young children are naturally interested in light and shadows, thus providing a meaningful context to introduce preschool science investigations. As children explore how shadows are made and change, they also have opportunities to develop math skills, specifically visual spatial awareness. In this article, we describe a set of light and shadows activities.

EDC's Young Mathematicians kits provide teachers and parents with games that are fun, spark conversations about math and provide rich learning opportunities.

Given the importance of early mathematics to academic success in all subjects, children need and deserve to build a robust knowledge of early math concepts in their earliest years. In this chapter, we consider the approach of the Young Mathematicians (YM) project at EDC, which for the past ten years, has partnered with families, teachers, and early childhood programs in richly diverse communities with large populations of students of color, linguistically minoritized students, and students living in poverty, to support math learning across home and school environments.

Language can affect cognition, but through what mechanism? Substantial past research has focused on how labeling can elicit categorical representation during online processing. We focus here on a particularly powerful type of language—relational language—and show that relational language can enhance relational representation in children through an embodied attention mechanism.

This article offers spatial reasoning math activities for school and home learning.

This report takes stock of what we currently know as well as what we need to know to make classroom assessment maximally beneficial for the teaching and learning of STEM subject matter in K–12 classrooms.