Developmentally Appropriate Practices

Understanding how children’s development at specific ages

affects the teaching and learning of mathematics

What is child development?

There was a time, as recently as the past century, when it was

generally accepted that children appeared to be (and interacted
with the world as) miniature adults, that the children’s thoughts
were less complex, less sophisticated, but not qualitatively
different. This notion has gradually been replaced by one that
matches children’s observable behavior more closely, that
children think in a different way from adults, that they draw
distinct conclusions from the same data. Child development is the
study of the way children see the world, the way their thinking,
moving, relating, and expressing themselves changes and evolves
as they become young adults.

How does an understanding of child development affect how

one might teach mathematics?

When child development and mathematics are mentioned in the

same breath, Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and Lev Vygotsky (1896-
1934) come to mind. Jean Piaget observed his own children very
carefully, noting their conversations, explanations, and questions.
He developed an articulated theory about how children’s thinking
develops. Piaget posited that children evolve gradually through
characteristic stages of thinking, known familiarly as the pre-
operational, concrete operations, and formal stages of thinking.
He wrote about the ways in which cognitive growth takes place, a
model that allows for a continual “folding in” of more complex
understandings. Vygotsky contributed significant insight into the
way in which we learn from those around us, in context, in
connection with those who have more skill. Vygotsky was
intrigued not only by the skills and understanding that children
possess, but also by the skills and understanding they’re on the
verge of possessing, also known as the zone of proximal
development. (This discussion skims only the topmost layer of
their work. Please pursue the following Web sites for more
complexity and accuracy: http://www.piaget.org,
http://www.bestpraceduc.org/people/LevVygotsky.html and
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~ALock/virtual/colevyg.htm .)

The theories and insights of Piaget and Vygotsky provide practical

guidelines for teaching children:
Look and listen very carefully to understand what children are
thinking. Try to develop and maintain the discipline necessary to
truly hear what children mean. This means not making
assumptions about what one may suppose children intend. It
includes the art of asking open ended questions, sometimes asking
questions to which you yourself don’t already know the answer,
and formulating questions that convey and include a crucial
curiosity in the child’s point of view. (For a wonderful guide to
this process, see Herbert P. Ginsburg’s, Entering the Child’s Mind,
ISBN 0-521-49803-1.)
The development of children’s cognition more clearly resembles a
spiral than an arrow. A thorough grasp of mathematical concepts
often requires repeated visits over many years. For example,
while kindergartners and first graders can count in base ten, it
may take until middle school until they are able to comprehend
that base ten is not the only counting system that exists, and that
there was a time when it didn’t exist! And if that older child (or
adult) is not afforded the opportunity to look again, the
understanding will remain at the level of the first grader, even
though the capacity for more sophisticated understanding is now
available.
Children’s minds grow in response to challenge. Just as the
process of teething involves chewing on dense objects in order to
acquire teeth, so learning mathematics includes mentally gnawing
on dense problems as a way to acquire the tools necessary to
penetrate and to absorb complex concepts. For example, well
before children are ready to manipulate numbers and to
understand their somewhat abstract meanings, they learn to count.
The counting song is random to begin with, and only gradually
evolves to be a source of wonder about recurring patterns, written
correlates, and unflinching quantities. But, none of this would
happen without the counting sequence.

There are two brief discussions to have before looking at age and
stage recommendations. They include the distinction between
arithmetic and mathematics and formal and informal
mathematics.

Distinction #1: Arithmetic Vs, Mathematics

There was a time when school children were introduced only to
arithmetic, to the rules and practice of computation. As children
grew, so the breadth of their mathematics grew, and other
branches of mathematics were gradually included: algebra,
geometry, data analysis & probability, and measurement. One of
the central convictions of the mathematics reform movement is
that children be introduced to the full range of mathematics
(which of course includes arithmetic) starting at kindergarten.
Arithmetic, the study of number and operations, is a segment of
what is presented, but it is presented as a related piece of the
whole body of mathematics. Keith Devlin, a very well published
mathematician, defines mathematics as the search for patterns.
Mathematics includes the search for patterns whether or not
numbers are involved. Within the discipline of mathematics, one
searches for patterns in shapes and space (geometry), within and
between data sets (statistics), over the course of many events
(probability), between functions (algebra), and within number
systems (computation and number theory).

Distinction #2: Informal vs. Formal Mathematics

Herbert Ginsburg, a noted contemporary scholar of Piaget, has
made the distinction between informal and formal mathematics.
Informal mathematics is the math one learned on one’s own,
through daily interactions, through real-life experiences. It’s the
math one learns without being “told how.” Formal mathematics,
is the grounding and extension of informal mathematics. Formal
mathematics joins the thinker to what other people have figured
out, what the culture has contributed over time. In one sense, it is
reasonable to say that informal mathematics lives in a child’s
stomach, whereas formal mathematics resides in the brain.

Regardless of the age of the child, formal mathematics must be

built on informal mathematics. If a child is not on “speaking
terms” with an informal math concept, through everyday personal
experiences (some of them deliberately facilitated by teachers)
formal math has no anchor. Formal math without an informal
foundation is invariably memorized and taken on faith. The
science of mathematics becomes a disconnected collection of
facts, which requires great effort to memorize and apply. Over
time, children become anxious about their ability to retrieve the
right piece at the right time and they become overwhelmed by a
body of knowledge that floats on a stressful continent of its own.
Constructivist learning, where children make active sense of the
formal mathematics they are adding to their repertoires, decreases
the stress and increases the depth of thought, the joy, and the
creativity in mathematics study.

Why would a child’s development affect learning

mathematics?

As a child’s world expands and her capacities shift, so what

fascinates her changes, too. When a child is learning to count,
there is nothing so absorbing as counting buckets of little
“thingies.” For a child at a later stage, counting the items is no
longer intriguing, but articulating and sharing strategies for
estimating without counting may be interesting. For a youngster at
an even more advanced stage, a bucket of small objects might
represent a point in exponential growth.
As children grow, the types of questions they find intriguing
develops. How many dimensions they can absorb widens, too.
The abstractness of mathematics increases as children age, though
manipulatives and models retain their role as very important. As
children grow up, they use mathematics for different purposes.
Mathematics can become an important tool for making sense of
the world. For example, it helps support an understanding of how
the world’s resources are shared, whether a particular practice is
equitable, to find trends in data reflecting social policy, and to
analyze patterns in demographics.
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has very
thoroughly described the range of mathematics that may be
expected and encouraged of children across the grades. The
electronic version of the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards is
the definitive outline for curriculum guidelines across the age
range.

Grades Pre-K-2

http://standards.nctm.org/document/chapter4/index.htm

Grades 3-5

http://standards.nctm.org/document/chapter5/index.htm

Grades 6-8

http://standards.nctm.org/document/chapter6/index.htm

Grades 9-12

http://standards.nctm.org/document/chapter7/index.htm