In the minds of most people learning mathematics resides in schools, institutes and universities. It is such a consolidated association that It’s hard to question it. However, research published in Mathematical Thinking and Learning shows that the mathematical learning It does not begin or end at school: it also happens at home, spontaneously and often completely unnoticed by the families themselves.
The researcher who led this study is Amber Simpson, associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership at Binghamton University, in New York (USA). Its starting point was a specific question: what happens to the STEM learning (YesscienceTechnology, Engineering and Mathematics or Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) when the children come home? To answer it, Simpson and his team designed twelve engineering kits called MAKEngineering aimed at children between second and sixth grade.
Each kit posed an open challenge using household materials. One of them, for example, proposed building the prototype of a house capable of protecting animals from an extreme weather phenomenon typical of their region. Seven families from the US participated in the study and provided recordings in which they were seen addressing the challenges together. The data was very revealing. Children used geometric reasoning, informal measurement, and proportional reasoning in a natural way during this experiment.
Mathematics is also at home
The biggest surprise of the study has nothing to do with the children. It has to do with the parents. There is a widespread assumption that parents lack the necessary knowledge to support their children’s mathematical learning. However, Simpson denies it: Caregivers do have this knowledge, but they exercise it in a way rooted in their usual ways of acting, and not in the school format. They are mathematics hidden in everyday practice, and precisely for this reason they go unnoticed.
The participation of twins provided a very revealing perspective on their interaction dynamics.
The study also identified another very important finding: the role of siblings. Those who worked together on the kits assumed both supportive and dominant roles, but remained involved in the design at all times. Amber Simpson has a separate article currently under review dedicated to this phenomenon. Interestingly, the participation of a pair of twins provided a very revealing perspective on their interaction dynamics.
Simpson argues that non-school mathematics has a legitimate place alongside classroom mathematics, so both should be taken into account equally. The challenge now is to translate these discoveries into practice. To achieve this, these researchers have developed training kits for teachers and have verified that it is essential that teachers themselves first face these tasks before proposing them to their students.
Widespread implementation of these kits in the classroom has not yet occurred, but this is precisely what Simpson and his colleagues propose. And his study is not just an academic argument that reveals where learning takes place; it is above all a vindication of value of what families are already doing without even knowing it. In any case, the question that Simpson leaves in the air has more scope than it seems: if mathematics is already happening at home, perhaps the problem is not teaching more, but learning to see what is already there. Within our reach.
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