Preschoolers' Number Sense; Article on Equity

Equity means to be equal, but with average class sizes being well over twenty, finding a group of students that come into the year with equal strengths, and capabilities would be hard. In this particular article the subjects were preschool aged. This means attention spans and abilities weren't comparable to a student in a higher grade. Traditional assessments would not show accurate data among four and five year olds because they wouldn't know how to take a test, or fill in a scantron. Modifying this traditional assessment to fit these needs resulted in what this article was written on. Students sat with an observer and handed the following materials; a bucket of bears and cards with dots or numbers. Goal of the activity; where there were many but for the child, it was their goal to match the number of bears with the number or gathering of dots represented on their cards. The observer guided students to communicated the number of bears they picked up, how many they had in total and how many they had compared to the second player. Students were observed on their abilities to count, compare, identify, use the strategy of quantification, and one-to-one correspondence, counting strategies and cardinality. As said earlier some students will be far ahead, some average and some below but by using this assessment consistently, children are can start out with the correct adaptions, accommodations and support to make it to the finish line. Not to mention this is an activity that disguises math in a fun game, re-constructing the connotation towards math.

Moomaw, S., Carr, V., Boat,M. and Barnett, D. (2010). Preschoolers' number sense. Teaching children mathematics 16 (6), 332-340