Math is a wonderful subject! It opens doors to incredible careers in science and to life’s great mysteries. But if it’s not approached right, early learners could become frightened of it. I’ve known students who dread the sound of the word math. Of course, dozens of books offer help to conquer math anxiety.
For teachers, getting math instruction right is critical, starting early. The way math instruction is handled could make or break a child’s spirit and teach them to either love or hate math. Here are a few points I hope you’ll consider.
High-stakes testing and the word rigor have no place in kindergarten.
Rigor hearkens back to NCLB and no-excuses. It goes even further back to A Nation at Risk, which falsely made public schools appear unsuccessful. It implies that teachers fail.
Rigor has no place in kindergarten or introducing math to a five-year-old. States shouldn’t hop on the rigor train.
California is an example. Concerned with children failing math in third grade, the focus there is on a math test to see if they [kindergartners] can face the rigors of first grade!
But throwing assessment at California’s kids isn’t new. Kindergartners there haven’t exactly been rambunctiously enjoying play in the California sunshine. They’re not test-deficient, as California frameworks from 2023 show, and the state had standards long before this.
So let’s say children aren’t understanding math or doing well in it. Does it make sense to get tougher? Wouldn’t it be wiser to revisit the standards?
If Californians already know their students aren’t doing well in math, why not learn if students like it and, if not, why? It seems like it’s time to look closer at the standards for age appropriateness.
How are girls treated when it comes to learning math?
Gender gaps have existed in schools for years. Concerns still flourish that teachers hold biases that girls have lower mathematical ability than boys. Today’s anti-women climate doesn’t help.
Who’s considering this issue in public schools? If expectations are a concern, where’s the change in schools to encourage and help females better understand math?
What about the effects of Common Core State Standards?
Standards in general have focused primarily on reading and math, and mostly reading, ignoring many other subjects that children would find interesting.
The Overview of California’s Approach to Mathematics from 2024 shows that California implemented the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics in 2010. It was updated in 2013.
Remember, 500 early childhood specialists originally described the CCSS as developmentally inappropriate (Strauss, 2013). If students aren’t doing well, why aren’t so-called experts reconsidering the CCSS?
Not all children get preschool, setting up differences in math understanding.
A critical point across the country is that not all students have been attending preschool or kindergarten. It’s obvious that some children will know counting and math concepts better than others when they have earlier exposure to math.
California is working to offer Transitional Kindergarten to more children, which could raise math skills as long as it involves age appropriate math and consideration of student ability.
Children who understand various math concepts when they enter kindergarten should not have to relearn those skills (Engel et.al, 2013). But that’s what might happen if teachers teach direct math instruction to the whole class.
Then again, if students miss preschool and later in kindergarten or first grade are identified as behind, when they simply haven’t learned the material, they could be seen unjustly as math failures.
Reardon and Galindo (2009) found that first and second generation immigrants from mostly non-English speaking homes, might start kindergarten with low math and reading skills, but showed the greatest improvement with assistance.
Also note, just because preschoolers learned math concepts early, doesn’t mean that they enjoyed it.
Help children see math in other subjects.
Over the years the separate and heavy focus on reading and math has been detrimental to children’s learning of other subjects. While each subject deserves its own serious study, showing children how math fits in other subjects makes it more real.
How many books that children can read celebrate math like, Michael Whaite’s 100 Cats and Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth? If children don’t have access to reading books they enjoy, math too could suffer.
Do children get the kind of science instruction that creates curiosity, or is there just pressure to master skills for tests?
How many children face screens to learn math?
Many math programs involve online instruction. While some online math programs might be fun for early learners, a little goes a long way. And it doesn’t appear to help children do better in math or reading.
A 2025 report from JAMA showed that higher parent-reported total screen time and TV and digital media time were associated with lower reading and math achievement on standardized tests in elementary school.
What’s meant by developmentally appropriate for kindergarten?
The problem with stating that early learners can do higher level mathematics is that it may be true for some children, but not all. Standards that sweep all children up with the same expectations to understand higher level math concepts earlier than ever will find many children failing.
How can a child be behind if they are doing the developmental work that used to be the norm for kindergarten ?
It’s wrong to expect all children to be at the same point in learning and aligned with standards, and it certainly isn’t a reason to disgrace California’s kids by plastering headlines about their dismal scores!
Kindergarten math should be flexible, permitting children to move along at their developmental rate of speed.
The Science of Math emphasizes explicit instruction aligning to standards.
Controversy surrounds the Science of Reading, used to sell many unproven usually online programs.
Now there’s the Science of Math which will likely align standards to children even further and sell more online programs.
Will such negative attention to learning math so early create math anxiety?
Math anxiety is real for young children, and once they build up fear it will be hard to generate their interest in math in the future. Children hear adults and they understand when all they hear is math crisis talk. No one likes a subject they suck at.
This is especially true for students with generalized anxiety, who could develop anxiety surrounding math, especially girls (Svraka et. al., 2024).
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Standards have dominated public education for years. Instead of being a simple guide to steer children’s learning, they’ve been used negatively, aligning children to the tests and pretending there is one right way to learn at X time for all.
Children who don’t align with the standards may be forced to undergo remediation, made to feel like they are lacking, where they were simply working according to their age and development.
What are math activities that match a child’s development, that kindergarteners will respond positively to, and which will help them to learn more math in the future? Ask a qualified early childhood educator who has studied child development and how young children learn from a reputable university education school. They will be able to tell you.
References
Engel, M., Claessens, A., & Finch, M. A. (2013). Teaching Students What They Already Know? The (Mis)Alignment Between Mathematics Instructional Content and Student Knowledge in Kindergarten. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 35(2), 157–178. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373712461850
Svraka, B., Álvarez, C., & Szücs, D. (2024). Anxiety predicts math achievement in kindergarten children. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1335952. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1335952
Reardon, S. F., & Galindo, C. (2009). The Hispanic-White Achievement Gap in Math and Reading in the Elementary Grades. American Educational Research Journal, 46(3), 853–891. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831209333184
Strauss, V. (2013, January 29). A Tough Critic of Common Core on Early Childhood Education. The Washington Post, Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/29/a-tough-critique-of-common-core-on-early-childhood-education/
Unfortunately, insight from someone as experienced and knowledgeable about early learning as Nancy is not allowed in mainstream reporting and policy. The level of knowledge, experience and thinking to understand developmentally appropriate practices is more nuanced and complex than a simple… here is the data from this test, that is the predominate product being sold to public education. And it has become product driven.
Those with power and money to make policy changes, don’t or won’t get it. I am a fan of Shark Tank, but not the views of education technology espoused by Kevin O’Leary. Over a decade ago he made a statement in one of the shows that it was too difficult to get products into schools – the idea being that schools weren’t capitalistic minded enough. That has changed. If you look at job descriptions for major education companies they require sales and marketing skills, not a strong understanding of child growth and development. How do you make easy to market products? By claiming that unlike teachers, computers are unbiased in providing data that can be used to meet standards. And if your child isn’t meeting the “standard” as reported by the computer, it’s because of teachers. It’s all so backward and not developmentally or socially appropriate. And as this piece discusses – damaging to young children. But we are preaching to the choir here.
Thanks. I’m afraid you’re right, as we are seeing with all the reading programs that repeatedly benefit from state funding, some that don’t have good track records.
I often wonder how students are REALLY doing in this country.
I went back and read Valerie Strauss’s 2013 article. Here is the crux of it: “Why were early childhood professionals excluded from the Common Core Standards project? Why were the grave doubts of our most knowledgeable education and health experts missing from the official record of this undertaking? Would including them have forced the people driving this juggernaut to face serious criticism and questions about the legitimacy of the entire project?” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/29/a-tough-critique-of-common-core-on-early-childhood-education/ I recall doing copious reading at the time about the many and significant flaws of the so-called Common Core State Standards. Try to find some of the posts by eminently qualified scholar and educator Robert Shepherd on this. Here is a paragraph from one of these posts: “The Professional Education Test, in particular, was an obscenity. Basically, it was written from the point of Ed Deformers, and to get a good score on it, I had to adopt the Ed Deform point of view and pretend that the Common Core wasn’t a puerile joke and that standardized testing in ELA wasn’t an unreliable, invalid scam. I did that and passed. The reading test was also a complete joke. The questions were so poorly written that one had to choose the answer that the test preparer thought was correct, not one that actually made sense, if there was such a thing.” https://dianeravitch.net/2019/04/13/bob-shepherd-life-as-a-teacher-in-the-age-of-the-deformers/ I had recently retired in 2013. What I remember from my researching the Common Core at that time was that not only were the standards developed mainly by companies that produced the standardized tests, with a limited number of actual classroom teachers involved, but that the standards were developed as aspirational goals for high school graduates entering college without needing remediation, and then walked back to the youngest students. That explains the mystery of why no actual, knowledgeable early education professionals needed apply.
There is no test for kindergartners that has validity; even for third graders validity on a standardized test is iffy.
That’s scary when you think of what they’re doing with tests…
Thanks for stating this, Christine.
Amen!
One of the things that horrified me as an elementary principal was that math proponents insisted on teaching abstract concepts from algebra and geometry in kindergarten. As with reading, curriculum specialists seem to have forgotten that abstract reasoning comes toward the teen years. Another trend that bothered me was this insistence on word problems the ignored foundational algorithms needed to understand math. If you want kindergartners to understand math principals you need a corner of the room full of blocks and legos where pattern comparisons are learned through tactile practice. Some activity can be structured through practical problems that have students build specific structures. I recall learning such structure through the following building plans for erector sets. If we focused on interest through curiosity we could start with rudimentary maker spaces used in most high performing independent schools. Our brains were designed for discovery through tactile exploration. Work sheets and screens with numbers are profound turn-offs for too many five year olds. Will we ever learn?
This is so true! Thank you, Paul!
“Our brains were designed for discovery through tactile exploration.” Yes! Visit any elementary classroom during a time where blocks, legos etc are used and you will see high engagement. The shift to a focus on “time on task,” “efficiency” and ultra-accountability for test scores – and making every second of the day instructional seemed to happen near 2010 at the elementary level. Also, the recognition that “early Intervention” was vital, was misinterpreted as teaching higher level skills earlier and more, and that scheduling children into very academic interventions rather than being with peers was better. The siloed focus (from admin, coaches etc) seemed to be on staffing, scheduling and tasks to meet their goals, rather than a wholistic view developmentally appropriate best practices.