Evaluación del conocimiento matemático temprano en una muestra de 3º de Educación Infantil

Authors

José I. Navarro GuzmánSalto de línea Manuel Aguilar VillagránSalto de línea Esperanza Marchena ConsejeroSalto de línea Concepción Alcalde CuevasSalto de línea Jesús García Gallardo Salto de línea Universidad de Cádiz. Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación. Departamento de Psicología. Cádiz, España.

Abstract

Assessing early mathematic preschool childrenSalto de línea Salto de línea In the field of different theoretical conceptions about the early mathematics learning, it is required to have an assessment instrument to evaluate the mathematical development of kindergarten students. An initial research of the Utrecht Early Mathematical Competence Test (EMTC) was carried out on 127 third year Spanish kindergarten school children. This test has new advantages: obtain the mathematic knowledge level of the students by screening them and also to get the logical and numeric processes involved in the mathematic knowledge. The students are from three different school of a 135.000 population town and they’re ranked on a medium or medium-high economical level. The boys average age was 63,65 months (dt=3,75) and 63,42 (dt= 3,49) for girls; (range of 57-70months). This test evaluates eight mathematical concepts: Comparison of quantitative and qualitative characteristics of objects; Classification of objects in class or subclass; Correspondence one to one relation; Seriation of objects in class or subclass based on criteria; Counting words, forward and backward; Structured counting, synchronous counting, shortened counting from the dice structure; Resultative counting, structured and unstructured quantities as well as counting hidden quantities; and General knowledge of numbers. The objective of this research was to know the mathematical development of kindergarten students concerning how they make relate concepts and count through an evaluation. The EMTC has been used in many European researches to validate longitudinal researches as well as to use it with early age students, special learning needs and with children that have difficulties on mathematics. We show the result on the established age range. A correlational analysis of the items allows us to have a single perspective about the evaluation. Reliability range estimated by Alpha de Cronbach was 0,89. To end with, we show the level of difficulty of the items and specify that at this age, different type of counting is one of the hardest.

Keywords

Rearly mathematics, mathematic competence, mathematical evaluation test, pre-school assessment.