Seeing mathematical learning opportunities in preschool situations: the role of teacher disposition and type of picture book

Abstract

Pre-school teachers’ competence to see and decide to use learning opportunities in informal play-based situations (i.e. situation-specific skills) is key for high-quality pre-school instruction. Current insights into pre-school teachers’ situation-specific skills and their association with underlying teacher disposition and instructional materials are limited. We aimed to complement existing findings by systematically analysing pre-service and in-service pre-school teachers’ situation-specific skills in association with their underlying disposition and the type of instructional material in the domain of early mathematics. We assessed 274 pre-service and in-service pre-school teachers’ mathematical content and pedagogical content knowledge (MCK, MPCK), beliefs and situation-specific skills, operationalised as the mathematical questions they formulate during simulated shared picture book reading activities. Logistic multilevel regression analyses revealed a complex interplay between pre-service and in-service pre-school teachers’ disposition, the type of instructional material and situation-specific skills, pointing to the need for future studies on the topic.

Keywords:

• Situation-specific skills
• teacher professional competence
• early mathematics
• pre-school
• picture books

Authors contributions

Emke Op ‘t Eynde: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data Curation, Writing Original Draft. Fien Depaepe, Lieven Verschaffel, and Joke Torbeyns: Funding Acquisition, Supervision, Writing Review & Editing. Anouck Lubon: Additional Analysis, Writing Review & Editing. Wim Van Den Noortgate: Software, Formal Analysis, Writing Review & Editing.

Statements and declarations

This study was not preregistered. Anonymized data are available upon request.

We would like to thank Eva Hoekx and Kim Van Steertegem for their assistance during data collection. Eva Hoekx used the data for her Master thesis study, as reported in Hoekx et al. (2021).

Permission to carry out the study was obtained from the Ethical review board SMEC of the KU Leuven, Belgium (G-2019 12 1887).

Discloure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Grant ZKD6093 - STG/18/046, picture books and mathematics, from the Research Fund KU Leuven, Belgium.