Jenny Young-Loveridge

Supporting Teachers in the Development of Young Children's Mathematical Thinking: Three Large Scale Cases.

Recognition of the importance of the early childhood years in the development of numeracy is a significant characteristic of the New Zealand Numeracy Development Project, the Victorian Early Numeracy Research Project and the Count Me In Too program in New South Wales, Australia. This article outlines the background, key components and major impacts of these three innovative and successful professional development and research initiatives. Juxtaposing the three projects highlights important commonalities—research-based frameworks, diagnostic interviews, and whole-school approaches to professional development. Each program has been significant in rethinking what mathematics and how mathematics is taught to young children.

Aspects that Affect Whole Number Learning: Cultural Artefacts and Mathematical Tasks

The core of this chapter is the notion of artefact, starting from the discussion of the meaning of the word in the literature and offering a gallery of cultural artefacts from the participants’ reports and the literature. The idea of artefacts is considered in a broad sense, to include also language and texts. The use of cultural artefacts as teaching aids is addressed. A special section is devoted to the artefacts (teaching aids) from technologies (including virtual manipulatives). The issue of tasks is simply skimmed, but it is not possible to discuss about artefacts without considering the way of using artefacts with suitable tasks. Some examples of tasks are reported to elaborate about aspects that may foster learning whole number arithmetic (WNA). Artefacts and tasks appear as an inseparable pair, to be considered within a cultural and institutional context. Some future challenges are outlined concerning the issue of teacher education, in order to cope with this complex map.

Teacher-Researcher Partnerships

In this chapter we describe the partnership between teachers and researchers engaged together in a small-scale research project. Using design research methodology, an exploratory project was planned and implemented initially in a Year 1 class, followed by iterations in the following two years in Years 1–3 classes (children aged 5–7 years). The project began with one teacher in the initial year, followed by two teachers in the second year, and then four teachers in the third year.