Adaption practices of facilitators in the context of early mathematics education-description and evaluation from a subject-related perspective

Abstract

The implementation of mathematical education in early childhood settings can be supported by professional development for early childhood educators. In order to reach a broad range of educators, a scaling up approach in which facilitators are qualified based on the professional development programEmMa - Erzieherinnen und Erzieher machen Mathematikseems suitable. The challenge here is that facilitators in the early childhood education context have hardly any mathematical and mathematical pedagogical content knowledge. The context of this study is the scaling up process of the professional development programEmMaunder these circumstances. The research interest lies in the description and evaluation of the facilitators' adaptation practices. We evaluated the adaptations based on two criteria: (1) precisionin the sense of completeness and clarity of the content and (2) correctnessmeasured by the absence of math-related errors. Since it is assumed that the theoretical, math-related content is particular challenging for these facilitators, this will be the focus of our analysis. We therefore conducted a video-supported, qualitative field study with N= 8 cases. Using qualitative content analysis, the adaptation practices of the facilitators were characterized and analyzed with regard to their precision and the math-related errors in these adaptations. It was found that the independent handling of mathematical content in the professional development course is despite intensive support demanding for the facilitators and associated with math-related errors for many facilitators. The implications of these results for future research are discussed.