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2013 Conference Proceedings - University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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involving addition and subtraction: join, separate, part-part-whole, and compare. The join andseparate problems involve an action and can have a result unknown, a change unknown or aninitial unknown. The part-part-whole and compare problems have no action, which tends tomake those more difficult for children to solve (Carpenter et. al, 1999).There are additional frameworks from the work <strong>of</strong> Steffe and von Glasersfeld (1983; 1988) tohelp teachers to consider how children’s mathematical thinking develops from direct modelingstrategies to more abstract and sophisticated strategies. These frameworks help teachers thinkabout how to use children’s current ways <strong>of</strong> operating to inform their instructional decisions.Children <strong>of</strong>ten begin solving story problems by directly modeling the story with counters orusing counting all strategies (Olive, 2001). It is not until children are able to see a group <strong>of</strong>objects as a unit that they are able to count on to solve story problems. Children at this level aresaid to be numerical and are counters <strong>of</strong> abstract unit items. Since counting is no longer rote forthem, they are said to have constructed their initial number sequence (INS). At the nextnumerical stage, which can be characterized as INS Plus, children are able to use the countingdown strategy more effectively and they have now determined that it is more efficient to solve anaddition problem by counting on from the largest number in the problem rather than the first.Thus, these children have constructed the commutative property <strong>of</strong> addition. Children who are atthe next level can solve all types <strong>of</strong> problems without the use <strong>of</strong> counting. They are able to takenumbers apart and put them back together in more convenient ways. They are said to beStrategic Additive Reasoners (SAR) (Steffe, et. al, 1983). The CGI researchers call thesestrategies using number facts.MethodsWe wanted to systematically study what PSTs get out <strong>of</strong> the interview project within thecontext <strong>of</strong> a subject matter preparation course. In particular, we wanted to know if the projectdesign meets the goals we set. For instance, did the PSTs learn to listen to children to informtheir mathematics and their instructional decisions? Were they able to identify counting schemesor strategic additive strategies that the child used when solving the CGI story problems? Werethey able to use their own mathematics to recognize the mathematical validity <strong>of</strong> a child’smethod?There were 26 participants in our study, all <strong>of</strong> whom were taking a Numbers and OperationsCourse designed specifically for Prospective Early Childhood PSTs. For all <strong>of</strong> the PSTs, this was<strong>Proceedings</strong> <strong>of</strong> the 40 th Annual Meeting <strong>of</strong> the Research Council on Mathematics Learning <strong>2013</strong> 44

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