Poster #88 - Teachers’ Knowledge of Math Development and Student Outcomes: A Formative Assessment Intervention

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

As early as preschool, children from lower-SES backgrounds are already performing below their middle- and higher-SES peers on math assessments (Lee & Burkam, 2002; Levine, Suriyakham, Rowe, Huttenlocher, & Gunderson, 2010). This early achievement gap is concerning because math knowledge prior to the start of formal schooling is one of the most important predictors of future academic achievement (Duncan et al., 2007). One promising way to improve math instruction is to help teachers be knowledgeable about the way that children learn different mathematics skills and concepts (Samara & Clements, 2009). Our team has developed a formative assessment-instruction system that aims to increase teachers’ knowledge about—and awareness of their students’ locations along—such learning trajectories. In the current study, we ask if preschool teachers’ knowledge of math development is related to their students’ outcomes, and if our intervention impacts this knowledge.

The Getting on Track assessment (GoT) is comprised of game-like tasks measuring 12 foundational math skills. Teachers administer 15-20 minute assessments to children individually three times over the year. GoT emphasizes students’ spatial reasoning, mathematical vocabulary, and both verbal and non-verbal knowledge. Teachers receive professional development and coaching to help them administer the assessment correctly, understand the skills it measures, interpret the results, and plan appropriate instruction around those results. A website application provides feedback on each child’s and the entire classroom’s progress and classroom activities for teachers to use based on their students’ performance.
Participants were 78 preschool teachers within 48 preschool classrooms, and 481 of their students. Classrooms were matched on demographic characteristics, then randomly assigned to an intervention or a business-as-usual control condition. At the end of the school year, we measured teachers’ knowledge of preschool math development at using an adapted version of the Knowledge of Mathematical Development Survey (KMD; Platas, 2014). The survey comprises 24 questions about children’s development of skills and concepts related to number, operations, and spatial reasoning. We measured students’ math skills at the end of the year using the Woodcock Johnson III Applied Problems and Quantitative Concepts subtests for numerical reasoning, and the WPPSI Block Design subtest for spatial reasoning.

We find a small, but marginal positive correlation between teacher’s knowledge of preschool math development and student’s numerical posttest scores (Figure 1; r=.259, p=0.07). Teachers in the intervention group who received the GOT assessment tended to show higher knowledge of preschooler’s mathematical development than teachers in the control condition, based on their responses to the KMD. While this result is not statistically significant, it is trending in the right direction with a medium effect size, which is substantial for an educational intervention (t(24) = 1.327, p = 0.19; γ10 = 0.3).

Previous analyses showed our intervention had a strong impact on children’s knowledge (Young et al., 2018). The current analyses highlight one possible mechanism behind this effect. Furthermore, these trends suggest that helping teachers understand their students’ current skills impacts their knowledge of math trajectories, which positively relates to their student outcomes.

Authors

• Cristina Carrazza, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Alana Foley, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Janet E Sorkin, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Debbie Leslie, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabet Spaepen, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marc Hernandez, NORC
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chris Young, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan C. Levine, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stephen Raudenbush, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author