University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

• Print

• Comments

• 

  UB education researchers Doug Clements and Julie Sarama are receiving millions of dollars in federal funding to pursue their work in early mathematics education. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE

By CHARLES ANZALONE

Published: February 21, 2011

The list of federal grants that allows Graduate School of Education researchers Doug H. Clements and Julie Sarama to continue their nationally distinguished work on teaching math to hard-to-reach pre-kindergarten children keeps growing.

Clements and Sarama, whose work in the Buffalo and Boston Public Schools systems has attracted wide academic and popular acclaim, have earned three new federal grants, all awarded in the past four months.

The most-recent grant is one for $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Studies (IES). The three-year award will fund Clements’ and Sarama’s ongoing work to help students learn what is known as STEM content—or Science, Technology, Education and Math—starting from the pre-kindergarten years and continuing throughout the elementary grades.

“This new funding will allow us to follow the progress of about 1,000 students who were involved in the early-childhood project called TRIAD (Technology-enhanced, Research-based, Instruction, Assessment and professional Development),” says Clements, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Learning and Instruction. “These children, from the Buffalo and Boston Public Schools, learned more than a control group on their pre-K through first-grade years. We will continue to gauge their learning of mathematics to study the later impact of their increased early achievement.”

The work of the husband-and-wife research team already has garnered acclaim from academic journals, as well as the mainstream media. A 2009 front-page story in The New York Times praised their work as being one of the few projects in the field of cognitive science to establish a successful track record. UB’s Building Blocks program could “transform teaching from the bottom up,” according to the article.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) also awarded Sarama and Clements two grants to work in early learning. In the first, a $2.5 million award will fund their efforts, as well as those of colleagues (and mother-and-son team) Curtis Tatsuoka and Kikumi Tatsuoka, to create and test a new early mathematics assessment. This assessment will use innovative statistical and computer technology to give teachers more useful and detailed information about children’s knowledge of mathematics in less time than existing assessments.

“Fast but fully informative assessments help teachers really know their students and support their use of the powerful teaching strategy of ‘formative assessment’ or individualizing learning,” says Clements.

The second, $3-million NSF grant will support a project to combine their work on the Building Blocks math curriculum with that of colleagues in other fields. Dubbed the Connect4Learning interdisciplinary curriculum, it will connect four basic domains of learning. In addition to mathematics, the grant includes experts in science (Kimberly Brenneman, Rutgers University), literacy/language (Nell Duke, Michigan State University) and social-emotional development (M. L. Hemmeter, Vanderbilt University).

“Early childhood is full of debates about subject matter, with arguments arising about new emphases on mathematics taking too much time away from literacy,” notes Sarama, principal investigator on this study and professor in the Department of Learning and Instruction. “Science is rarely mentioned. Further, there is little research on whether an emphasis in one area necessarily means less emphasis in others, or whether they can be combined, each to the benefit of others.

“We believe the latter, and believe our Connect4Learning curriculum will encourage all children to develop their full potential in all four areas—a potential that is greater than often realized.”

In the end, the principle behind Clements’ and Sarama’s work is simple but profound: It all revolves around why early learning is so important.

“Research from educators and economists agree,” Sarama says. “The most beneficial time to enhance children’s learning is the earliest years. The main goal of all our work is to contribute to this critical foundation of early learning.”