Abstract
This study examined absolute and relative judgment accuracies of German early childhood (EC) teachers with respect to the mathematical skills of the children under their supervision. The two types of judgment accuracies are crucial prerequisites for pacing activities in EC education and offering differentiated educational activities adapted to individual skill levels of children. Data from 39 EC teachers and 268 children were analyzed using multilevel modeling. Teachers rated the skills of children on a structured observation instrument (“Kinder Diagnose Tool,” KiDiT). Children were assessed on their mathematical skills with a standardized test (“Mathematische Basiskompetenzen im Kindesalter,” MBK-0). On average, 65% of the variation in judgments of teachers on the KiDiT could be explained by MBK-0 scores of children, which suggest that teachers are—on average—able to rank children within their groups. Teachers were also able to judge the mathematical level of skills of children as assessed by the MBK-0. Neither mathematical content knowledge (MCK) of teachers nor their mathematics pedagogical content knowledge (MPCK) or general pedagogical knowledge (GPK) moderated the relationship between judgments of teachers and test scores of children or the relationship between the level of the judgments and the level of test scores. Conclusions for future research and practice are drawn.
Highlights
We focused on mathematics, which means that interpretations have to be restricted to this domain
Evaluating skills of children in a standardized way is—with the exception of intelligence tests for the identification of intellectual disabilities or giftedness (Kranzler et al, 2016)— rare so that the assessment of judgment accuracy of teachers with the help of the standardized KiDiT tool can be regarded as another strength
Our main findings are that within EC teachers’ groups of children, a high degree of relative judgment accuracy and in addition on average a decent degree of absolute judgment, accuracy exists. These results provide further evidence for the validity of the KiDiT tool which is widely used in German-speaking countries to rate the mathematical skills of children
Summary
The purpose of the present study is to close part of this research gap with respect to the mathematical skills of children in playbased EC education. The first purpose of this study was to examine the correspondence between relative and absolute judgments of EC teachers and the mathematical skills of children. The second purpose of this study was to identify predictors of judgment accuracy of EC teachers. The second objective of this study was to identify predictors of judgment accuracy of EC teachers
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