The impacts of an early mathematics curriculum on oral language and literacy

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Abstract

Competence in early mathematics is crucial for later school success. Although research indicates that early mathematics curricula improve children's mathematics skill, such curricula's impacts on oral language and early literacy skills are not known. This project is the first to investigate the effects of an intensive pre-kindergarten mathematics curriculum, Building Blocks, on the oral language and letter recognition of children participating in a large-scale cluster randomized trial project. Results showed no evidence that children who were taught mathematics using the curriculum performed differently than control children who received the typical district mathematics instruction on measures of letter recognition, and on two of the oral language (story retell) subtests, sentence length and inferential reasoning (emotive content). However, children in the Building Blocks group outperformed children in the control group on four oral language subtests: ability to recall key words, use of complex utterances, willingness to reproduce narratives independently, and inferential reasoning (practical content).

Highlights

► We examine the effects of early math curricula on oral language and literacy skills. ► Cluster Randomized Trial showed no effect of Building Blocks on letter recognition. ► Building Blocks showed no effect on two of the oral language subscales. ► Building Blocks positively affected four oral language subscales.

Section snippets

Oral language

Both receptive and expressive oral language skills are strongly related to early literacy development (e.g., Cooper, Roth, Speece, & Schatschneider, 2002), later academic success (e.g., Bishop and Edmundson, 1987, Catts, 1993, Pankratz et al., 2007, Paul et al., 1996, Snow et al., 1991), and future linguistic skill (e.g., Conti-Ramsden et al., 2001, Pankratz et al., 2007). Specific components of early oral language, including vocabulary, grammar, semantics, and narrative discourse processes

Letter recognition

Similarly, letter recognition, one early component of orthographic development and pre-reading skill, is a strong independent predictor of later reading success (e.g., decoding, naming speed, phonological awareness, writing, see Denton and West, 2002, McGill-Franzen, 2010, Molfese et al., 2006b). For example, letter recognition scores at Kindergarten have been reported as strong predictors of second grade and fourth grade word recognition and reading comprehension (Catts, Fey, Tamblin, & Zhang,

Linking language and literacy with mathematics

Different bodies of research report conflicting findings concerning the effects of mathematics curricula on early language and literacy. The impact of time-on-task (or time on instruction) on learning provides prima facie justification for the concern of subject-matter conflict (e.g., Bodovski & Farkas, 2007). From this frequently-voiced perspective (see Clements and Sarama, 2009, Farran et al., 2007, Lee and Ginsburg, 2007, Sarama and Clements, 2009a), the introduction of a mathematics

The present study

We investigated the effects of a preschool mathematics curriculum on children's learning of language and one measure of emergent literacy. Two cluster randomized trial (CRT) experiments have supported the effectiveness of a research-based early mathematics curriculum, Building Blocks in improving mathematics attainment (Clements and Sarama, 2007c, Clements and Sarama, 2008a), and a small-scale “proof of concept” CRT experiment supported the efficacy of the implementation model, TRIAD (Sarama et

Participants

The participants used in these analyses were from the first year of the large-scale research project, Scaling-up TRIAD: Teaching Early Mathematics for Understanding with Trajectories and Technologies. The two participating school districts were targeted because they traditionally serve children from low-resource communities. To be involved in the study, the districts were required to agree to randomly assign all eligible schools (those whose preschool teachers had not worked in any previous

Comparability of groups

Table 2 presents descriptive statistics on all measures. The two treatment groups, Building Blocks and control, were not significantly different at the beginning of the study on the TEAM pretests, t (1,026) = −1.086, p = .285. There were no significant differences on TEAM (math) pretests between those for whom we did and did not collect letter recognition scores, F (1, 1,303) = .012, p = .914, or between those who did or did not receive the oral language assessment, F (1, 1,303) = .227, p = .634.

Hierarchical linear model (HLM)

We used

Discussion

Certain early mathematics curricula have been shown to improve preschooler's mathematics competences (e.g., Clements and Sarama, 2007c, Clements and Sarama, 2008a, Clements and Sarama, 2011a, Griffin, 2004). The literature includes both theoretical and empirical works that suggest such curricula may also facilitate children's development of language and literacy competencies. For example, mathematics and language appear to have co-mutual influences. The mathematics curricula may benefit

Acknowledgements

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through grants to the University at Buffalo, State University of New York: Grant No. R305K05157, “Scaling Up TRIAD: Teaching Early Mathematics for Understanding with Trajectories and Technologies” and Grant No. R305A070468A, “Comprehensive Postdoctoral Training in Scientific Education Research.” The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the U.S.

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