“Highway Closures and Flow Detours”: Shifting the Mindset of Pre-service Early Childhood Educators Through Number Operations with Base-12 Blocks
摘要
The current research study investigated pre-service early childhood educators’ (n = 71) experiences in learning and then conducting operations in the base-12 system, as well as how such experiences impacted their perceptions about teaching numbers. Analysis of the collected data showed that the participants (a) experienced anxiety when conducting computation without conceptual understanding, and (b) witnessed the power of manipulatives such as base-12 blocks in facilitating computations with unfamiliar numeral systems. Our study displayed how offering pre-service teachers the opportunity to explore non-base-10 systems may help them to recognize key cognitive emotional challenges for students learning about numbers and operations, and thus help to improve their pedagogy for teaching these topics to their future students.