All Shapes and Sizes: Promoting Early STEM Talk Is Easier Than You Think

• In Event: Parental Support of Math Readiness Skills: How to Promote and Optimize It

Abstract

During their second-year children begin to label geometric shapes, despite relatively little exposure to them (Resnick et al., 2016), and they know some basic shape names by age 3 (Clements et al., 1999; Verdine et al., 2016).  However, most children do not initially apply shape names to unusual variants (e.g., an isosceles triangle) or understand their defining properties (e.g., that triangles have 3 sides and 3 angles; Satlow & Newcombe, 1998). Knowing shape properties is foundational to early mathematics and future STEM learning (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010).

But how do children build definition-focused concepts of shapes?  One way is through interactions with parents while playing with geometric shapes or tablets. Parents can label shapes, highlight their defining characteristics, and use spatial language (e.g., side, angle, big) to discuss them. However, research indicates that even early educators rarely do these things (Rudd et al., 2008) and that shape toys seldom include varied shapes (Resnick et al., 2016). Tablets include shape games but often do not offer much other spatial information. This study focuses on parent-child interactions during play with either tangible shape sets or a shape app to see if they influence shape discussions.

Language was coded for 60 parent-child dyads from 5 minutes of free-play with one of three toy sets: 1) iPad - an interactive app that included 10 canonical shapes; 2) canonical - 20 wooden shapes (2 identical versions of each); and 3) alternate - a mixed set of 10 wooden canonical and 10 alternate shapes (e.g., an isosceles triangle) (see Figure 1).  

Analyses show that parents used significantly less language of all types (total, shape names, spatial language, and questions) in the iPad condition compared to the concrete shape sets (see Figure 2). Though most parental language did not differ between the canonical and alternate shape sets, they did make more than three times within-shape-category comparisons with the alternate shape set than the canonical set.

Children’s language was also affected by toy condition. They produced the fewest words when playing with the iPad, followed by the canonical shapes, and the most with alternate shapes. They produced shape names more frequently and used a greater variety with the concrete shape sets compared to the iPad app. Importantly, the alternate shapes elicited more spatial language and questions from children.

Minor adjustments to shape toys influence the properties of shapes that parents and children highlight during playful interaction. Toy sets with multiple shape versions provide parents with an opportunity to discuss shape properties and may elicit more curiosity and engagement from children. These findings have important implications for the design of both concrete and digital educational materials and suggest that a first step in improving early shape learning may be providing better materials to parents and teachers to use during play.

Authors

• Laura Zimmermann, University of Delaware

• Brian Verdine, University of Delaware

• Lindsey Foster, University of Delaware

• Maya Marzouk, University of Delaware

• Dunia Tonob, University of Delaware

• Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University

• Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, University of Delaware