Assessment of mathematics in Preschool-class
2021 (English)In: NORSMA10 paper session 5: Equal access for all learners to quality mathematics education, 2021Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Early identification of children at risk is essential to prevent and remediate mathematical learning difficulties (Gersten, Clarke, Haymond, & Jordan, 2011), but it requires valid and reliable assessment tools (Aunio, 2019). Measures developed for younger students (<9y) have usually covered areas like number sense, relational skills and counting skills, because of their predictive value for later mathematical skills (Jordan, Glutting, & Ramineni, 2010; Zhang et al., 2020). Studies on mathematical learning difficulties across different grade levels show that number processing (De Smedt & Gilmore, 2011; Skagerlund & Träff, 2016) and basic arithmetic skills (Zhang et al., 2020) seem to differentiate students with MLD from their peers. Consequently, the aim of this study was to investigate the factor structure and grade-level development in the new digital Functional Numeracy Assessment (FUNA) tool for grades 3–9. Students from both Swedish and Finnish speaking schools in Finland participated in the study (N = 4070). FUNA is a digital assessment tool embedded in the VILLE collaborative learning platform developed by the Centre of Learning Analytics of the University of Turku. FUNA consists of seven different subtasks; symbolic magnitude comparison, number-dot matching, number sequence, numerical ordering, single-digit addition, single-digit subtraction, multi-digit addition and subtraction. In the first four tasks, reaction time (RT) and accuracy was used to form an efficiency measure (number of correct items/medianRT of the correctly solved items). Students had 2 minutes to solve as many tasks as possible for single-digit addition and subtraction respectively, and 3 minutes for the multi-digit addition and subtraction tasks. Preliminary results show that there is grade-level development in symbolic magnitude comparison, F (6, 4063) = 213.34, p < .001, 𝜂2𝑝𝜂p2 =.24 (Figure 1). Students in higher grades process numbers more efficiently compared to students in lower grades. In NORSMA we will also present the grade-level development in the other subskills and the factor structure of FUNA.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021.
Keywords [en]
Early assessment, mathematics, preschool class
National Category
Pedagogy
Research subject
Education
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-207789OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-207789DiVA, id: diva2:1755381
Conference
NORSMA10, Conference on quality mathematics education, Reykjavik, Iceland, (Virtual conference), November 4-5, 2021
2023-05-082023-05-082023-05-08Bibliographically approved