Live Poster Session: Zoom Link
Abstract:
Previous research suggests that numeracy skills predict later academic achievement (Duncan et al., 2007), yet not all children get the early support they need to develop these skills. Children enter preschool with significant individual variation in mathematical knowledge, and these differences are associated with factors such as socioeconomic background, parent engagement in math activities at home, and parents’ math ability (Elliott et al., 2017; Gunderson & Levine, 2011; Lee & Burkham, 2002; Skwarchuk et al., 2014). The Wesleyan Preschool Math Games project was developed within the framework of guided play to offer preschool classrooms math activities that are fun, flexible, easy to adapt to different levels, and support the core competencies of early numeracy, with an emphasis on cardinality and promoting math talk. Guided play, defined as child-led playful activity supported by an adult who provides guidance towards a learning goal, represents a powerful structure to support learning (Weisberg et al., 2013a; Weisberg et al., 2016; Zosh et al., 2018). Yet many aspects of guided play remain undefined and a careful balancing act must be maintained between children’s autonomy and instructional goals. In the present study, we focused on a crucial aspect of guided play implementation: the scaffolding instructions and training given to teachers, which we developed as two distinct, research-informed approaches to our curriculum. The first “low guidance” approach emphasizes the child’s own exploration and discovery and encourages in-the-moment instruction when the child asks for assistance. In contrast, the “high guidance” approach emphasizes focusing the child on the numeracy aspects of the activities and maximizing opportunities for adult and child number talk. Children’s numeracy will be assessed before and after the intervention with five standard numerical assessment tasks.
To explore how teachers were using the games in their classrooms, several measures of fidelity of implementation were developed. Fidelity of implementation is the extent to which teachers’ behaviors when delivering a program align with intervention intentions (O’Donnell, 2008, 34). A weekly survey and observation instrument were developed to assess multiple facets of teachers’ fidelity of implementation. Taken together, the measures indicate an adequate level of fidelity in some aspects and areas for improvement in future interventions. A survey for teachers’ guided play beliefs was also created to assess the impact of teachers’ pre-existing beliefs on their implementation of the intervention. The creation of fidelity of implementation measures for the Wesleyan Preschool Math Games exemplifies a strong connection between fidelity of implementation measures and the theory of the intervention, for fidelity to be considered from the conception of an intervention, and for fidelity to support an intentional relationship between the research and the implementer.
SRCD-Poster