Ola Helenius

Behavior and neuroimaging at baseline predict individual response to combined mathematical and working memory training in children

Mathematical performance is highly correlated with several general cognitive abilities, including working memory (WM) capacity. Here we investigated the effect of numerical training using a number-line (NLT), WM training (WMT), or the combination of the two on a composite score of mathematical ability. The aim was to investigate if the combination contributed to the outcome, and determine if baseline performance or neuroimaging predict the magnitude of improvement. We randomly assigned 308, 6-year-old children to WMT, NLT, WMT + NLT or a control intervention. Overall, there was a significant effect of NLT but not WMT. The WMT + NLT was the only group that improved significantly more than the controls, although the interaction NLTxWM was non-significant. Higher WM and maths performance predicted larger benefits for WMT and NLT, respectively. Neuroimaging at baseline also contributed significant information about training gain. Different individuals showed as much as a three-fold difference in their responses to the same intervention. These results show that the impact of an intervention is highly dependent on individual characteristics of the child. If differences in responses could be used to optimize the intervention for each child, future interventions could be substantially more effective.

When Is Young Children’s Play Mathematical?

One of Bishop’s six mathematical activities is playing which includes modelling, hypothetical thinking and abstraction. These can be in young children’s play, but do they by their presence make this play mathematical? In this chapter, we explore this question by first defining play and then comparing its features with what is known about mathematicians’ academic play and how mathematics education researchers have described young children’s play. From this theoretical discussion, we discuss the features of play, which can enable it to be described as mathematical. We use these features to analyse a small episode of children playing to discuss if and how their play could be considered to be mathematical.

Explicating professional modes of action for teaching preschool mathematics

ABSTRACT Play-based preschool pedagogy usually relies on informal teaching while policy trends and some research call for increased formalisation of the pedagogy. Using Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing, this article characterises mechanisms that link evaluation of preschool to the push towards the formalisation of teaching in preschool. Moreover, it is suggested how preschool teaching of mathematics can be conceptualised in a way that widens the pedagogical responsibilities of the teachers to include a broader range of social activities than typically expected. These responsibilities concern how teachers are involved in pedagogical situations, if situations are planned and if the mathematics is a pedagogical goal in the situation or instrumental in some other activity. It is argued that a practice built on these principles could both honour well-developed play-based preschool practices and provide a structure for teaching preschool mathematics in which using traditional child–teacher interaction is only one of many options.

Differential Enhancement in Mathematical Pre-School Class Activities

In this chapter, an adapted version of Dowling’s distributive strategies is used to show how two children, Klara and Teo, are provided with differential enhancement in the mathematical learning opportunities that they are offered. The analysis shows that the use of everyday settings of mathematics problems, including expectations about the social relationships in those settings, can cause children to collude in the kind of enhancement that they experience. Expectations about the social relationships, within the problems being solved and between the participants, contributed to the two children using strategies which channelled them towards operating in different domains.