LeFevre – ECEs and math

I think we all are very familiar with a message that you should read books to children and everybody’s supposed to read lots of books, whether it’s pre-school or daycare or at home. And so we sort of started from that point and said okay, we know that, we know early literacy is important. How about early math? Is that important as well? What do people think about it? 

And so we surveyed I think almost 800 early child care people and we went to conferences and we followed up on connections and so on and we did find some interesting things about differences again, contrasting it to their knowledge of early literacy. So, for example, people felt they knew less about early mathematics than they did about early literacy learning and they as a group were somewhat less knowledgeable about what children were able to do at different ages as well.