Abstract
Social inequality in mathematical skill is apparent at kindergarten entry and persists during elementary school. To level the playing field, we trained teachers to assess children's numerical and spatial skills every 10 wk. Each assessment provided teachers with information about a child's growth trajectory on each skill, information designed to help them evaluate their students' progress, reflect on past instruction, and strategize for the next phase of instruction. A key constraint is that teachers have limited time to assess individual students. To maximize the information provided by an assessment, we adapted the difficulty of each assessment based on each child's age and accumulated evidence about the child's skills. Children in classrooms of 24 trained teachers scored 0.29 SD higher on numerical skills at posttest than children in 25 randomly assigned control classrooms (P = 0.005). We observed no effect on spatial skills. The intervention also positively influenced children's verbal comprehension skills (0.28 SD higher at posttest, P < 0.001), but did not affect their print-literacy skills. We consider the potential contribution of this approach, in combination with similar regimes of assessment and instruction in elementary schools, to the reduction of social inequality in numerical skill and discuss possible explanations for the absence of an effect on spatial skills.
Highlights
Social inequality in mathematical skill is apparent at kindergarten entry and persists during elementary school
Under the current education system, we ask teachers to promote the mathematical knowledge and skills of every child, but without adequate information about what children already know, what they need to know to advance to the level, how to tailor instruction to push learning to the level, or how well current efforts are working toward that end
We describe in detail what is meant by a dynamic instructional regime in early math and how this strategy connects with a life-course developmental framework for eliminating social inequality in mathematics
Summary
Social inequality in mathematical skill is apparent at kindergarten entry and persists during elementary school. We designed a system of longitudinally adaptive assessment and instruction that enables teachers to assess each child’s numerical and spatial skills and to enact child-specific instructional strategies to improve those skills. This process iterates three times during the school year. We reason that, if effective, this instructional regime would raise the whole distribution of math proficiency among low-income children at kindergarten entry, creating potential for reducing inequality over the course of elementary school. We take an essential step in establishing the potential of such a regime by testing its efficacy in the preschool years
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