The Advocate – Charles Lussier
“The growing emphasis on math and science instruction in elementary and secondary grades is almost nowhere to be found in many preschools and early childhood settings, an expert in the field told a Baton Rouge audience Wednesday. Kimberly Brenneman, program officer for education at the Heising-Simons Foundation in Los Altos, California, laid out for an audience of more than 150 people gathered at the Crowne Plaza hotel what she described as a dismal state of affairs. She summarized what researchers have found observing preschool classrooms. In one study, researchers found that during a six-hour day, just 58 seconds were devoted to math. Another, observing a prekindergarten for a day, found 3 percent of the time was occupied by teaching math, and only 1 percent on science. And yet another covering 49 hours in six classrooms found no math taught at all. When surveyed, though, early childhood educators tell researchers that they are interested in incorporating more such instruction — STEM, as it’s called these days, short for science, technology, engineering and math — into their classrooms, but they have little training or experience in actually teaching it.”(more)