Showing posts with label
The role of pictures in picture books on children's cognitive engagement with mathematics.
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Showing posts with label
The role of pictures in picture books on children's cognitive engagement with mathematics.
Show all posts
ABSTRACT: The present study examines the
cognitive activity that is evoked in young children when they are read a picture book that is written for the purpose
of teaching mathematics. The focus of this study is to explore the
effects of pictures on children’s spontaneous mathematical cognitive engagement. The study is based
on the assumption that the pictures in a picture book that is aimed at
supporting children’s learning of mathematics can have story-related components
and mathematics-related components. The story-related components of the
pictures contribute to grasp the global story context
of the text and the mathematics-related
components help to understand the mathematical content of the story. All of the
pictures of the book under investigation, Six
brave little monkeys in the jungle, have both story-related and
mathematics-related components included. The pictures have a representational
or an informational function. Four 5-year-old children were read individually
the book by one of the authors without any
probing. A detailed coding framework was used for analyzing the children’s
utterances that provided an in-depth picture of the children’s cognitive
activity. The results show that the picture book as a whole has the potential
for cognitively engaging children. However, the pictures with a
representational function were found to elicit mathematical thinking to a
greater extent than the pictures with an informational function.
