Windows to early childhood mathematics teacher education

Abstract

This special issue comes at a time when the issue of early childhood mathematics has come to the fore. At a recent 2009 Conference of European Research in Mathematics Education, a new working group in Early Years Mathematics was established in response to increased calls for research regarding mathematics learning and mathematics teacher education in the early years (ages 3–8). A joint position paper published in the United States by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) stated that ‘‘high quality, challenging, and accessible mathematics education for 3–6 year old children is a vital foundation for future mathematics learning’’ (National Association for the Education of Young Children and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 2002, p.1). Further evidence of concern for early childhood mathematics may be seen in the rise of national curricula in various countries which now make specific and sometimes mandatory recommendations for including mathematics as part of the preschool program. For example, in Israel, the National Mathematics Preschool Curriculum (Israel national mathematics preschool curriculum (INMPC) 2008) is mandatory and contains specific guidelines and aims for children from 3 to 6 years. A clear indication of the growing awareness of the importance of early childhood mathematics is the vast increase in the number of articles that are devoted to early childhood mathematics in the research literature. The inclusion of a specific chapter in which the current research on early childhood mathematics learning is summarized, in a handbook of research on mathematics teaching and learning for the first time, is a clear sign of the growing attention to this domain (Clements and Sarama 2007). One may wonder about the recent, growing attention to early childhood mathematics. Evidently, there are institutional, economic, and equity issues that support this significant increment (e.g., a world-wide increase in the numbers of children attending early-care