An Evaluation of Good Practice when Teaching Early Mathematical Concepts Summary

An Evaluation of Good Practice
when Teaching Early Mathematical Concepts (EYFS AND Year 1)
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An Evaluation of Good Practice when Teaching Early Mathematical Concepts
(EYFS AND Year 1)
Introduction
Effective learning is highly desirable in teaching. Good teaching practices are fundamental precursors of effective learning, where learners achieve teaching goals and objectives. Teaching at all levels is challenging due to the demand for high grades, increasing curriculum workloads, and learner-centric issues. The teacher navigates these challenges through deploying practices that optimize the learning process and outcomes. Teaching EYFS and Year 1 requires a set of skills, strategies, methods, and practices that allow learnings to gain and apply mathematical knowledge. The teacher facilitates guidance and extends children's mathematical learning processes through meaningful interactions underpinning best practices. The curriculum, interactions, and enabling environment are core areas of focus in EYFS practice, while equally noting that pedagogy in EFYS is different from Primary. Best practices should deploy different pedagogy and develop a specific curriculum, learning structure, and environment, and emphasizing the role of a teacher at the level of EFYS and year I.
Meaning of Good Teaching Practice
Good teaching practices comprises proven, tested, and widely agreed strategies that are considered highly effective and efficient. Good practices make up a model whose results are proven or evidenced-based. A best practice embodies accepted teaching strategies that are superior to any alternatives because of their optimized learning outcomes or is considered a standard approach to teaching.
Identification, Description, and Evaluation of Learning Theories and Good Practice associated with Teaching of early Mathematics.
It is challenging to teach mathematics effectively. Most teachers encounter various problems while engaging in the mathematic learning process and activities, especially amongst EFYS and year I classes. Contemporary teachers should overcome such challenges and adopt different strategies that guide children during mathematics lessons. Most approaches to addressing challenges in mathematics and facilitating effective learning among early childhood learners, such as EFYS and year I, are anchored on different theoretical frameworks. Teaching theoretical frameworks to teach mathematics early encapsulates various theories such as behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and the recent theory of connectivism (Kashefi et al., 2017 pp. 607-612).
The theory of behaviorism is one of the centric approaches to teaching mathematics across all groups of learnings and levels of learning, including early childhood. According to behaviorism learning theory, learners are often influenced by external environments. Alteration of learners' environment results in his or her shift in thoughts, behavior, and feelings. The purpose of instruction for the behaviorist is to cause the desired response from the learner presented with a target stimulus (Ertmer and Newby, 2013, pp 47).
Behaviorism-related learning is anchored on positive reinforcement and rewards. Reinforcement learning is based on operant conditioning. Positive responses are pleasurable and reward behavioral-related outcomes for being optimized, while negative responses are painful, punishing outcomes to be minimized (Ho et al.,2015, pp.2). When learners are positively reinforced or reward for achievement in various learning areas such as math, they tend to perform better as they will be motivated to repeat behaviors that result in improved learning. Equally, punishments lead to similar outcomes. According to behavioral theory, learners respond to internal and external stimuli, which influence the efforts geared towards learning and academic performance. Rewarding learners with special gifts, treat, or party, for good performance in mathematical learning activities and performance, is likely to encourage such patterns of behavior associated with successful learning.
Rewards are often used in classrooms and are recommended as a critical component of evidence-based cooperative learning (Sears and Pai, 2012 pp.246). Treat such as group rewards that are given based on performances have been proven to increase individuals' learning and are perceived to do so by motivating learners in sharing knowledge (Sears and Pai, 2012 pp.246-247). Punishments such as taking away specific privileges if the student behaviors in a way that disengages or impedes effective learning can help learners practice and embrace learners' behaviors that optimize overall learning.
Teaching with evaluative feedback revolves around expectations on how learners will interpret rewards and punishments. Rewards and punishments should be applied appropriately to promote learning in all subjects, including math. Teachers should interrogate the effect of rewards and punishments intended to modify behavior. Behaviorists strive to advance strategies that build and strengthen stimulus-response associations by using instructional cues, practice, and reinforcement. These are reliable and effective in recalling facts, generalizations, associations but cannot adequately explain the acquisition of higher-level skills (Ertmer and Newby, 2013, pp 49).
Cognitivism is another unique theory that can be applied among young learners. In the 1950s, learning theory shifted from behavioral models to an approach anchored on learning theories in the tenets of cognitive sciences. This change was accompanied by increasing de-emphasis of overt, observable behaviour but stressed more complex cognitive processes such as thinking, problem-solving, language, concept formation, and information processing (Ertmer and Newby, 2013, pp 50). The cognitive theory stresses the acquisition of knowledge and internal mental structures by focusing on the learning processes while addressing how information is received, organized, stored, and retrieved ((Ertmer and Newby, 2013, pp 50). Cognitivism resembles behaviorism because of its emphasis on the role that environmental conditions play in facilitating learning. Cognitive-related theories make knowledge more meaningful and helpful to learners because they allow children to organize and relate new knowledge to existing memory information.
Cognitivism is attributable to Piaget, who advanced various cognitive stages that teachers and educators can leverage to inform learning strategies and models. These stages included sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational (Ghazi, Ullah & Jan 2016, pp. 10). Jean Piaget's focus on children's cognitive development, especially on quantitative concepts and mathematics, has gained a lot of attention within education. Piaget groups learners or children according to age, but it should be noted that the development of each child may differ from another, and rates at which each child transitions from one cognitive stage to another vary due to various factors such as maturity, culture, and experience of such a child (Arnon et al.2014, pp.5-12). In the sensorimotor stage, the child progressively acquires object permanence in which she or he can find objects after they have been displaced. The child at the sensory-motor stage can link numbers to objects such as two cats. The best approach to learning mathematics at the sensory-motor stage is to allow freer space for the child to interact with the environment as he or she tries to related numbers and objects (Arnon et al.2014, pp.5-12). Teachers should create an environment involving some simple counting, especially on objects or relatable items.
The next stage is the Preoperational phase, where children show an increase in language ability characterized by over-generalizations, symbolic thoughts, selfish perspectives, and limited logic. Children should be engaged mathematically with problem-solving tasks involving various relatable items such as water. At his stages, children lack logic, and thereby, a teacher should not teach math activities that involve logic. During this stage and age, children can develop a symbolic play, manipulate symbols, and see the order of games, which are relevant concepts in mathematics learning (Ghazi, Ullah & Jan 2016, pp. 12).
The next phase is the concrete operation stage, where a child has now developed a substantial cognitive milestone. At this stage, two-three dimensional figures can be considered in learning, participate in classification and serialization, and actively participate in hands-on skills on activities involving mathematics. The formal operations stage is an advanced cognitive level where children can form a hypothesis, develop consequences and apply logic in math. At this level, the child can reason abstractedly and do complex mathematical problems involving analys...