Whilst research underlines the importance of early mathematics in kindergarten, practitioners need effective and innovative approaches to pedagogy. Currently, very different approaches are deployed from an instructional, educator-led approach based on training programmes to a play-based approach. This intervention study examines the effects on the mathematical competency of these two pedagogies. Thirty-five kindergarten educators and 324 six-year-old children were randomly assigned to either a training programme, a play-based approach with card and board games or to the control group. Educators' views on the interventions were gathered in semi-structured interviews. The results indicate higher learning gains overall for the play-based approach. Differentiated effects were found as tendencies: children with low competencies tend to gain more from training programmes compared to no intervention; children with high competencies gain more from the play-based approach than the training. Educators evaluated the play-based intervention with card and board games as better suited to children's diverse needs.
Kindergarten children enjoy playing games, as games bring motivation and active learning. Many board and card games require mathematical competency and therefore, carefully selected board and card games could be used as meaningful learning tasks for mathematics education in early childhood. With this in mind, several games for fostering quantity-number competencies have been implemented in an intervention study. The study included 6 years old children and three conditions: training program (n = 110), play-based intervention (n = 89) and control (n = 125). For this article, videos involving 21 children in ten teams from one of the most widely played games in the play-based intervention were selected for in-depth analysis: the board game Shut the Box. This explorative analysis of children's mathematical behaviour and peer support whilst playing a board game allows researching in what way a specific game provides a meaningful learning task for early mathematics. The results show that children employ several mathematical skills while playing, depending on their individual quantity-number competencies. As the game can be easily repeated several times, the children practise and shape mathematical skills and monitor and support their co-player in order to increase their chances of winning the game. It is suggested, that the board game provides an adaptive and motivating setting, which can meet the learning needs of low as well as high achieving children.Keywords: quantity-number competencies, play-based early mathematics, early childhood education, play, video
The concept of psychological trauma implies that people experiencing traumatic stress are wounded, thus relating to the metaphor of a physical injury. Although this notion is widely accepted by clinicians and researchers in mental health, there is evidence of a broad range of metaphorical idioms for extremely aversive experiences or catastrophic events across different cultures. In this ethnopsychological study, we aimed to investigate and contrast culturally shared metaphors for trauma among four distinct cultural groups: two indigenous communities (Pitaguary from Brazil, Adivasis from India) and two rural communities (mountain villagers of Gondo, Switzerland; the Lemko ethnic minority in Poland). The communities in Brazil and in Poland were marked by historical trauma, and the communities in India and Switzerland each suffered from a natural disaster. Semistructured interviews that focused on metaphors shared within each community were conducted with key informants and laypersons (Brazil: N = 14, India: N = 28, Poland, N = 13, Switzerland: N = 9). We conducted separate metaphor analyses, then cross-culturally contrasted the findings from the four samples. Across the four cultural groups, we found similar metaphorical concepts of trauma related to bodily processes, such as shock, burden, and wound. Throughout history, several metaphorical concepts have been used to describe what today is called psychological trauma. Some known expressions include "nervous shock," railway spine," "shell shock," and "traumatic hysteria" (e.g., Young, 1997). The current concept of trauma, from the Greek meaning "wound," metaphorically refers to extremely aversive experiences and catastrophic events as a physical injury, as the term originated from somatic medicine. It was only in the 1980s, when the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was introduced, that the concept of trauma underwent a semantic shift from an organic injury to psychological distress (Haslam, 2016) Currently, at least in Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (i.e., WEIRD) countries (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), people who experience traumatic stress are considered to be wounded, an analogy to a physical injury that reflects implicit notions related to the wound metaphor (Maercker & Heim, 2016). However, literature stemming from outside Western or WEIRD societies has pointed to different metaphorical concepts, such as baksbat, a Cambodian term that translates to "broken courage;" susto, a Latin American term meaning "fright;" and noro, a term used The research in this study was made possible by a grant from the Pettit Foundation (F-63212-11-01).
Purpose: Psychological trauma can be viewed as a metaphor which originates from somatic medicine and comes from the Greek word “wound”. To gain a better understanding of trauma in a culturally sensitive way, the present project aimed to explore alternative metaphors used to describe extreme aversive or catastrophic events.Methods: This ethnopsychological study was carried out among the Adivasis indigenous people in tribal communities in Pune, India. We performed 28 interviews with lay persons and key informants, focusing on collectively shared metaphors. The data were examined using systematic metaphor analysis.Results: While the most prevalent metaphorical concepts found related to shock and wound, we also identified culture-specific idioms and common themes in the descriptions related to trauma. The most predominant expression, which was used by all of the participants, was “this should not have happened” (asa nahi vhayala pahije hota). These findings indicate that metaphorical concepts reflect implicit worldviews and beliefs in the community under study.Conclusion: The main implication of the results found is to increase awareness of different expressions in clinical settings, pointing to potential approaches to the cultural adaptation of clinical interventions in general.
Whilst research underlines the importance of early mathematics in kindergarten, practitioners need effective and innovative approaches to pedagogy. Currently, very different approaches are deployed from an instructional, educator-led approach based on training programmes to a play-based approach. This intervention study examines the effects on the mathematical competency of these two pedagogies. Thirty-five kindergarten educators and 324 six-year-old children were randomly assigned to either a training programme, a play-based approach with card and board games or to the control group. Educators' views on the interventions were gathered in semi-structured interviews. The results indicate higher learning gains overall for the play-based approach. Differentiated effects were found as tendencies: children with low competencies tend to gain more from training programmes compared to no intervention; children with high competencies gain more from the play-based approach than the training. Educators evaluated the play-based intervention with card and board games as better suited to children's diverse needs.
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