Kindergarten math is often too basic. Here’s why that’s a problem

Kindergarten may be math’s most important year — it lays the groundwork for understanding the relationship between number and quantity and helps develop “number sense”

Kindergarten math is often too basic. Here’s why that’s a problem

By Holly Korbey for The Hechinger Report

On a recent morning, the children used plastic red and yellow dots for a counting exercise: One student tossed the coin-sized dots onto a cookie sheet while another hid her eyes. The second student then opened her eyes, counted up the dots and picked the corresponding number from a stack of cards.

The dots showed up again a few minutes later in a more complex task. Murphy set a two-minute timer, and students counted as many dot arrays as they could, adding or taking away dots to match a corresponding written number. Four dots next to a printed number 6, for example, meant that students had to draw in two extra dots — an important precursor to learning addition.

Kindergarten may be math’s most important year — it lays the groundwork for understanding the relationship between number and quantity and helps develop “number sense,” or how numbers relate to each other, experts and researchers say.

But, as detailed in The Hechinger Report, too often teachers spend that crucial year reinforcing basic information students may already know. Research shows that many kindergarteners learn early on how to count and recognize basic shapes — two areas that make up the majority of kindergarten math content. Though basic math content is crucial for students who begin school with little math knowledge, a growing body of research argues more comprehensive kindergarten math instruction that moves beyond counting could help more students become successful in math later on.

Because so many students nationally are struggling in math — a longstanding challenge made worse by remote schooling during the pandemic — experts and educators say more emphasis needs to be put on foundational, early childhood math. But for a variety of reasons, kindergarten often misses the mark: Math takes a backseat to literacy, teachers are often unprepared to teach it, and appropriate curriculum, if it exists at all, can be scattershot, overly repetitive — or both.

Manipulating numbers in different ways, part of a supplemental math curriculum for Murphy’s whole class at Hilltop Elementary in this suburb of Philadelphia, is an attempt to address those problems. In an effort to improve math achievement district-wide, all elementary students in the Chichester School District get an extra 30-minute daily dose of math. In kindergarten, the extra time is spent on foundational skills like understanding numbers and quantity, but also the basics of addition and subtraction, said Diana Hanobeck, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction.

Chichester district leaders say implementing the intervention, called SpringMath, along with other steps that include hiring a math specialist for each school, has brought urgent attention to students’ math achievement by bringing more students to mastery — and a lot of that has to do with how much students are learning in kindergarten. Student math achievement, which dropped to a low of 13.5 percent of students proficient or advanced during the pandemic, has more than doubled across grades since the intervention began, although still below the state average. Last spring, 47 percent of the district’s fourth graders were proficient or advanced in math on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test.

“The intervention is very targeted by skill and gives teachers data for each student,” said Hanobeck. “We are seeing it close gaps for students, and they are more able to access elementary school math.”

Murphy, the kindergarten teacher, said that while some students arrive at school able to do “rote counting,” others arrive with no prior knowledge or a very limited understanding of numbers and counting. The interventions have improved all students’ accuracy and fluency in more complex tasks, such as being able to count up or down from a number like 16 or 20, and adding and subtracting numbers up to 5.

“It used to take all year for some students to count on from different starting points, that’s actually really hard for kids to do,” Murphy said. “Students are meeting their goals far faster now. We are moving on, but also moving deeper.”

That deep thought is important, even in the earliest grades. Kindergarten math proficiency is especially predictive of future academic success in all subjects including reading, research has shown. In one study, students’ number competence in kindergarten — which includes the ability to understand number quantities, their relationships to each other, and the ability to join and separate sets of numbers, like 4 and 2 making 6 — presaged mathematical achievement in third grade, with greater number competence leading to higher math achievement.

It’s also the time when learning gaps between students are at their smallest, and it’s easier to put all students on equal footing. “Kindergarten is crucial,” said University of Oregon math education researcher Ben Clarke. “It’s well-documented in the research literature that gaps start early, grow over time and essentially become codified and very hard to remediate.”

But the math content commonly found in kindergarten — such as counting the days on a calendar — is often embedded within a curriculum “in which