Understanding the concept of Mathematics: Its importance in early years of schooling
By Charles K. Assuah, (Ph.D.)
Just as a building requires a strong foundation for it to stand firmly, children learning Mathematics require good conceptual understanding to enable them to excel into higher level in the study of the subject with minimal challenges.
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Like building blocks, this transition should be done in a very coherent manner with optimal supervision by all stakeholders, including teachers, parents and policy makers.
There is no doubt that the importance of Mathematics is downplayed sometimes by researchers including educators. Some of them assert that many courses can be understood without a basic knowledge of Mathematics. This is a fallacy in my view, because whatever justification anyone gives, some knowledge or understanding of numeracy is needed for learners to understand theories and laws underpinning such courses.
Good understanding
A good understanding of Mathematics, therefore, is the bedrock upon which the theories that underlie most applied courses are founded. These courses include but not limited to Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geology, Engineering, Economics, Accounting and Finance. Thus, the role Mathematics plays in the theoretical foundation of these courses cannot be understated.
A good conceptual understanding of Mathematics, for the most part, is needed for children to fully grapple with and to explain the complexities involved in the interpretations of proofs and theories in these courses.
Conceptual understanding is the construction of relationships among mathematical facts, procedures and ideas. To help develop conceptual understanding, children should be able to attend explicitly to connections among facts, procedures, and ideas; and teachers should encourage children to wrestle with important mathematical ideas in an intentional and conscious way.
Conceptual understanding could be enhanced if children are explicitly able to make important mathematical relationships at the primary levels. Teachers in this regard, could play the central role of demonstrating these relationships to children through their instructional delivery.
They could explain why, for example, an arithmetic procedure worked and children should be given the opportunity to justify their own solution methods. Sometimes, children could be called upon to demonstrate and explain ideas and procedures that lead to a given result or conclusion. They could also be asked to examine carefully the differences and similarities between concrete symbolic representations of the same quantities and operations.
Teachers’ efforts
Even though some efforts are unconsciously exercised by a few teachers to improve children’s conceptual understanding, it is amazing that given the robustness of the link between instruction and important relationships, many teachers in Ghana still focus on low-level mathematical ideas and facts, and rarely attend explicitly to important mathematical relationships.
Many studies have demonstrated that children’s conceptual understanding is greatly enhanced if teachers assign them with challenging tasks and allow them to find new solution methods on their own. Through these assigned tasks, children confidently engage in complex mathematical topics, sometimes approaching the same problem from different perspectives.
As a nation, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel; we have to do the right things. A few countries are getting it right. We need to emulate them, and if possible, overtake them in our efforts to provide quality and effective Mathematics education for our children. It should be noted in no uncertain terms that improvement in instructional delivery should be one of our major preoccupation.
The writer is a lecturer, Department of Mathematics Education, University of Education, Winneba
