I work with 3 to 5 year old children, all bellow the poverty line, working with STEM and early literacy learning. This was a great article just due to the frustration I see of my students literacy programs we spend thousands of dollars on. They think all children can just see and learn letters without going to the foundations of shapes and distinguish sounds.
I can't tell you how many children have difficulty with straight lines vs curved lines. Now bring that to learning letter shapes of A and H or S. It is believed that children learn straight line letters that cross quicker than curved, but I have not seen this with the hundreds of children I see every week. I now struggle on the now what in my work to get down to the shapes sooner rather than later with that work and how to convince these horrible developmentally inappropriate children applications that I use to work more in these foundational steps. If anyone wants to back me to take a 2 year sabbatical to develop some children tools it would be greatly appreciated :)
Have you looked at Maria Montessori's pedagogy? my daughters both learned to write cursive, starting at age 2 with tracing activities (geometrical inset/outset, sandpaper letters, etc.). Having watched them interact with apps on the iPad, I think the sensorial and perceptual presence of the learning materials is very important -- apps are not a sufficient substitute.
"I think the sensorial and perceptual presence of the learning materials is very important -- apps are not a sufficient substitute."
I have wondered if a custom touchscreen setup could be designed to make this easier. The problem seems to me not to be something intrinsically "wrong" with screens, but that the touchscreens are too smooth if you use them with some sort of stylus, and to have too much difference between static and dynamic friction if you use your finger directly on the screen. As an adult, my handwriting gets noticeably worse on a touchscreen with a stylus, and only marginally better than my third-grader's writing when using my finger. It seems like if someone put their mind to it, a touchscreen+stylus combo could be created that would be very similar to pencil-on-paper in feel. It's even possible this could be done with a stylus and a generic overlay that could be put on any existing touchscreen (albeit possibly limited to higher quality capacitive screens).
The disadvantage is that this overlay will probably render the underlying touch screen no longer pleasant to use with a finger, and you probably want a semi-permanent adhesion so it's not going to be a thing you can easily take on and put off. (It could be experimented with but I bet it doesn't work out very well.) But still, an off-the-shelf tablet + $20 (at scale) in stylus + overlay might be able to mitigate and/or eliminate the sensory issues, while retaining the advantages that an app can bring, instant feedback primarily.
(In my opinion, the biggest thing that computers can bring to education is instant feedback, which can be mathematically shown to improve the maximum possible learning rate, and any attempt to bring computers into education that don't involve harnessing this are starting at a severe disadvantage.)
I work with Head Start in the US. We also use the same materials and they really are great. The issue I am running into is how to be cutting edge with STEM and be developmentally appropriate with activities. The vast majority of apps are just glorified worksheets and worksheets don't work. When you do a 1 for 1 real-life to digital-life examples the real-life works better 100%. If I want to show cause and effect nothing works better than dominions.
I'm sure if you had some way to app-ize your ideas or generate a return on investment, many people here would back you. (Shouldn't need to be said, but I do feel expedient education of our youth is endlessly valuable despite where it might sit in the capitalistic cabal)
Sadly I am the only STEM Lab Coach in the nation for 3 to 5-year-olds, that I know of. So I kind of had to invent my own position which thankfully has been supported by local Fortune 500 Companies in the community.
I read a lot from our curriculum "Creative Curriculum", accreditation standards and philosophy and my old Developmental Psychology classes. Lots of Academic research and many online resources like the Fred Rodgers Institute (http://www.fredrogerscenter.org/).
The only book I found to be helpful has been "Instructional Technology in Early Childhood: Teaching in the Digital Age." Most books are either surface level practical (I really enjoy the philosophy piece which is usually missing) or outdated and not very valuable.
My favorite introduction to Piaget was the book Mindstorms, about Seymour Papert and the development of logo at MIT. I'm interested in anyone on this thread contributing more to my reading list. Some of the references in that article are very esoteric to me.
> Piaget’s theory formulates a peculiarly inverted version of Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law that unites historical phylogeny and mental ontogeny in a recursive Möbius-band-like figure.
I've Googled quite a few words from that sentence and still can't wrap my head round it. Can anyone ELI6?
> Piaget’s theory formulates a peculiarly inverted version of Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law that unites historical phylogeny and mental ontogeny in a recursive Möbius-band-like figure.
Individual development (ontogeny) restates historical evolution (phylogeny). Haeckel’s biogenetic law says that as an embryo develops it will pass through its past historical states as a species. It's a long discredited 19th century scientific hypothesis.
Inverting the relationship would state that historical evolution is restating individual development OR in the other sense of inverting, they move in the opposite order to one another (Mathematicians: Euclid -> Topology, Kids: Topology -> Euclid).
Basically, kids build up knowledge of topology from everyday interaction with the world and then move onto Euclidean shapes with the knowledge of topology.
Mathematicians discovered it all in the opposite order, starting with Euclidean geometry and only later documenting topology.
Tremens answered about Häckel; the Möbius strip part is Piaget’s model of learning which says that knowledge undergoes continuous rewriting rather than being simply accretive, a view which I would think should be unremarkable today.
Häckel came from a 19th century conception of “advancement” or “progres” — think of that absurd 19th century picture of various apes followed by a human, as if a human is somehow the “most evolved” of the animals. The idea of adaptation to the environment was alien (and apparently frightening) to most people in the West.
That was Herbert Spencer’s Belief, yes, as he had a rather reductio “Gadgrind” view of knowledge and worth (he is also the originator of the phrase “social darwinism” and, amusingly, is buried across from his rival Karl Marx. This simplistic view is pretty much dead these days.
I am still a bit confused, am I interpreting this correctly? From an individual perspective, embodied tacit knowledge precedes conceptualized knowledge. In this example the process of drawing refines the spatial skills / cognition required to grasp Euclidean geometry. And the process of cultural knowledge progression does not necessarily follow this developmental order?
Up to “and the process” yes, this is what Piaget taught. And that learning is a process of comtinuous rewriting of what you think you know, based on your experiences.
Separately: some people, like Spencer, who believe that “progress” has a direction, that “more advanced” societies have more universal knowledge that accumulates like stacking paper on a table, (and this was the challenge of Darwin) that humans are closest to god and all other creatures are inferior (you can see how this extends to a belief that there are different races (=breeds) of humans, both in genetics/god’s engineering and in culture).
Then tying the two together: you can look at the development of an individual human as an iterative, never ending and somewhat meandering process or you can say that you just have to transfer those stacks of paper, bottom to top, and then you’re done.
The connection between the two may sound absurdly tenuous but sad to say it is highly politicized and to this very day affects how schools are organized and funded, culture, politics, beliefs about right and wrong and how people should behave.
I can't tell you how many children have difficulty with straight lines vs curved lines. Now bring that to learning letter shapes of A and H or S. It is believed that children learn straight line letters that cross quicker than curved, but I have not seen this with the hundreds of children I see every week. I now struggle on the now what in my work to get down to the shapes sooner rather than later with that work and how to convince these horrible developmentally inappropriate children applications that I use to work more in these foundational steps. If anyone wants to back me to take a 2 year sabbatical to develop some children tools it would be greatly appreciated :)