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Mathematics in Early Childhood Education: Revolution or Evolution?

Hachey (2013) aptly describes a recent surge in attention tomathematics for young children. Thevalue ofmath for children asyoung aspreschool age, however,was discoveredbefore the 21st century.What we are experiencing is not a revolution but rather a potentially important step in an evolution of work that began at least a half century ago. Some historical context to the current interest reveals that although some issues related to mathematics teaching have taken on new flavors, others have a long history. My own experience of early childhood education dates back to the 1960s, so I begin there. Research demonstrating that very young children possess a significant capacity for learning mathematics was prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Ginsburg’s finding that 4-year-old children were fairly accurate in estimating proportions was published in 1967. In 1972 Gelman demonstrated that even 3-year-old children understood number invariance when the language load of the task was reduced, and her 1978 book with Gallistel, The Child’s Understanding of Number, extensively documented young children’s math skills. Although most researchers and educators interpreted Piaget’s theory of child development to support a laissez-faire approach to education in which children were allowed to discover (or construct) logical thinking on their own, many researchers, such as Gelman (1972), believed that Piaget underestimated young children’s mathematical competencies, and some promoted the teaching of concrete operations, including numerical reasoning (Engelmann, 1967; Engelmann et al., 1971). Perry Preschool, developed in the 1960s, for example, included specific lessons on seriation and spatial and temporal relations (Weikart et al., 1970). Concerns about economically disadvantaged children’s relatively poor preparation for school were also prominent in the 1960s, with the initiation of Head Start being the most prominent case in point. Like interest in teaching mathematics to young children, a focus on the achievement gap has been around for a long time, and it stimulated the development of structured math instruction for preschool-age children decades ago.