Many children who live in poor economic areas are unable to count past 10 and cannot perform simple mathematics by the time they arrive to preschool. These skills, vital to the growth and development of knowledge in beginning students, are the focus of two UB professors.
UB School of Graduate Education professors Doug H. Clements and Julie Sarama are accomplished in the research arena. Known nationally for their research in early childhood learning, Clements and Sarama have received three new federal grants, totaling over $7 million, to continue their work teaching math to underprivileged students.
Through their TRIAD program (Technology-enhanced, Research-based, Instruction, Assessment, and professional Development) they have developed a feature known as "Building Blocks." Clements and Sarama designed this math curriculum from cognitive science research that uses simple activities that students are familiar with.
"Building Blocks is everything children would normally engage in," Sarama said in an article in UB Today. "Stories, puzzles, songs, block-building. The key is what students are being asked. We're teaching teachers how to ask the appropriate questions and thereby push the children along mathematically in all areas of math, including geometry."
This work, most recently featured in a front-page story in The New York Times in 2009, has led the researchers to national academic and popular acclaim, and more importantly, three new federal grants to help continue their work.
The most recent grant Clements and Samara received is for $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Studies (IES). This three-year grant will help to further their TRIAD work with underprivileged children. They plan to focus on STEM (science, technology, education, and math) content knowledge in the prekindergarten through elementary grades.
"We know that you get more ‘bang for the buck' working in early childhood than any other age. We also know that early mathematics competencies are far more important, as in predicting later school success, than people ever thought previously," Clements said. "We know children from low-resource communities are not provided with sufficient high-quality educational opportunities, and we have dedicated the past two decades to research and development in those areas."
Along with the IES grant, Clements and Sarama have also received two grants, for a total of $5.5 million, from the National Science Foundation.
The first grant will fund efforts of Clements and Sarama, along with the help of colleagues, to create and test a mathematics assessment that will ultimately give teachers more insight on children's knowledge in less time than existing assessments.
The second grant will be used to combine Building Blocks' mathematics specialty with other disciplines of learning.
Clements and Sarama have partnered with experts in the other three categories of the four basic domains of learning – science, literacy, language, and social-emotional development – to extend the depth of their program.
"For many years there has been tension in the field about whether we should focus on pre-academic skills or social-emotional development during the early childhood years. I have always felt that it is not an either/or, but rather we should do both," said Mary Louise Hemmeter, of Vanderbilt University, the partnership's expert in social-economic development. "I see this as an opportunity to help them teach across subject areas in a way that not only supports the children's literacy, math, and science learning, but which promotes children's social-emotional development."
Clements and Sarama began their work in 2006, focusing on students in Buffalo and Boston public schools. Over the past five years, they have tested children in over 400 classrooms through their TRIAD program.
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