Duration: 2022 – 2024
Principal Researcher
Hélia Pinto
Team Members
Hélia Pinto
Isabel Simões Dias
Nicole Gaspar
Grupo Projeto Creche
UI&D: CI&DEI
The Early Childhood Education project: Mathematics in a daycare context (EIM2C) aims to study the emergence of mathematical competences in a daycare context. Framed in Early Childhood Education, it is based on Mathematics Education to discuss numerical skills, spatial thinking skills and mathematical reasoning in day-to-day daycare, in a logic of authentic assessment.
Understanding Mathematics as a way of perceiving the world, it is assumed that Mathematics is part of the daily life of human beings since birth. In the first three years of life, the baby/child learns through action and interaction. It is by being an agent of their own development, interacting in a playful way with space(s)/object(s), peers and responsive adults that the child appropriates himself, others and the world around him. In this sense, it is through experience and education through sensory experimentation that in the early years children develop mathematical skills (number and quantity, similarities/differences, shapes, sizes/weights, spaces, patterns, order, correspondences, enumerations, classifications, mathematical language, developing their logical-mathematical thinking) that, intuitively and spontaneously, incorporate the actions they initiate and that request the activation of their motor and visuospatial skills.
Continuing the work Mathematical ideas in day care context: evidence from practice (Dias, 2017) and the Sentido espacial na creche: a torre dos cubos (Dias, Pinto, & Gaspar, in press), EIM2C proposes to carry out a systematic review of the literature on mathematics in day care (see task 1), design and implement an empirical study to be carried out in a day care context, with children between 4 months and 3 years old, in the central region of Portugal (see task 2). Assuming an interpretive research approach, it is estimated to collect data through observation and videographic recording (aiming to find evidence that could go unnoticed). The results of the studies developed (RSL and empirical study) will be published in national and international journals and in scientific events. It is also intended, with the knowledge acquired, to propose the realization of a Short Advanced Program (SAP) within the scope of RUN-EU (https://run-eu.eu/) (see task 3) and the edition of a e-book on this topic (see task 4).
Understanding Mathematics as a way of perceiving the world, it is assumed that Mathematics is part of the daily life of human beings since birth. In the first three years of life, the baby/child learns through action and interaction. It is by being an agent of their own development, interacting in a playful way with space(s)/object(s), peers and responsive adults that the child appropriates himself, others and the world around him. In this sense, it is through experience and education through sensory experimentation that in the early years children develop mathematical skills (number and quantity, similarities/differences, shapes, sizes/weights, spaces, patterns, order, correspondences, enumerations, classifications, mathematical language, developing their logical-mathematical thinking) that, intuitively and spontaneously, incorporate the actions they initiate and that request the activation of their motor and visuospatial skills.
Continuing the work Mathematical ideas in day care context: evidence from practice (Dias, 2017) and the Sentido espacial na creche: a torre dos cubos (Dias, Pinto, & Gaspar, in press), EIM2C proposes to carry out a systematic review of the literature on mathematics in day care (see task 1), design and implement an empirical study to be carried out in a day care context, with children between 4 months and 3 years old, in the central region of Portugal (see task 2). Assuming an interpretive research approach, it is estimated to collect data through observation and videographic recording (aiming to find evidence that could go unnoticed). The results of the studies developed (RSL and empirical study) will be published in national and international journals and in scientific events. It is also intended, with the knowledge acquired, to propose the realization of a Short Advanced Program (SAP) within the scope of RUN-EU (https://run-eu.eu/) (see task 3) and the edition of a e-book on this topic (see task 4).