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Addressing the Math-Practice Gap in Elementary School: Are Tablets a Feasible Tool for Informal Math Practice?
Students rarely practice math outside of school requirements, which we refer to as the “math-practice gap”. This gap might be the reason why students struggle with math, making it urgent to develop means by which to address it. In the current paper, we propose that math apps offer a viable solution...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5318409/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28270780 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00179 |
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author | Stacy, Sara T. Cartwright, Macey Arwood, Zjanya Canfield, James P. Kloos, Heidi |
author_facet | Stacy, Sara T. Cartwright, Macey Arwood, Zjanya Canfield, James P. Kloos, Heidi |
author_sort | Stacy, Sara T. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Students rarely practice math outside of school requirements, which we refer to as the “math-practice gap”. This gap might be the reason why students struggle with math, making it urgent to develop means by which to address it. In the current paper, we propose that math apps offer a viable solution to the math-practice gap: Online apps can provide access to a large number of problems, tied to immediate feedback, and delivered in an engaging way. To substantiate this conversation, we looked at whether tablets are sufficiently engaging to motivate children’s informal math practice. Our approach was to partner with education agencies via a community-based participatory research design. The three participating education agencies serve elementary-school students from low-SES communities, allowing us to look at tablet use by children who are unlikely to have extensive access to online math enrichment programs. At the same time, the agencies differed in several structural details, including whether our intervention took place during school time, after school, or during the summer. This allowed us to shed light on tablet feasibility under different organizational constraints. Our findings show that tablet-based math practice is engaging for young children, independent of the setting, the student’s age, or the math concept that was tackled. At the same time, we found that student engagement was a function of the presence of caring adults to facilitate their online math practice. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5318409 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-53184092017-03-07 Addressing the Math-Practice Gap in Elementary School: Are Tablets a Feasible Tool for Informal Math Practice? Stacy, Sara T. Cartwright, Macey Arwood, Zjanya Canfield, James P. Kloos, Heidi Front Psychol Psychology Students rarely practice math outside of school requirements, which we refer to as the “math-practice gap”. This gap might be the reason why students struggle with math, making it urgent to develop means by which to address it. In the current paper, we propose that math apps offer a viable solution to the math-practice gap: Online apps can provide access to a large number of problems, tied to immediate feedback, and delivered in an engaging way. To substantiate this conversation, we looked at whether tablets are sufficiently engaging to motivate children’s informal math practice. Our approach was to partner with education agencies via a community-based participatory research design. The three participating education agencies serve elementary-school students from low-SES communities, allowing us to look at tablet use by children who are unlikely to have extensive access to online math enrichment programs. At the same time, the agencies differed in several structural details, including whether our intervention took place during school time, after school, or during the summer. This allowed us to shed light on tablet feasibility under different organizational constraints. Our findings show that tablet-based math practice is engaging for young children, independent of the setting, the student’s age, or the math concept that was tackled. At the same time, we found that student engagement was a function of the presence of caring adults to facilitate their online math practice. Frontiers Media S.A. 2017-02-21 /pmc/articles/PMC5318409/ /pubmed/28270780 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00179 Text en Copyright © 2017 Stacy, Cartwright, Arwood, Canfield and Kloos. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Stacy, Sara T. Cartwright, Macey Arwood, Zjanya Canfield, James P. Kloos, Heidi Addressing the Math-Practice Gap in Elementary School: Are Tablets a Feasible Tool for Informal Math Practice? |
title | Addressing the Math-Practice Gap in Elementary School: Are Tablets a Feasible Tool for Informal Math Practice? |
title_full | Addressing the Math-Practice Gap in Elementary School: Are Tablets a Feasible Tool for Informal Math Practice? |
title_fullStr | Addressing the Math-Practice Gap in Elementary School: Are Tablets a Feasible Tool for Informal Math Practice? |
title_full_unstemmed | Addressing the Math-Practice Gap in Elementary School: Are Tablets a Feasible Tool for Informal Math Practice? |
title_short | Addressing the Math-Practice Gap in Elementary School: Are Tablets a Feasible Tool for Informal Math Practice? |
title_sort | addressing the math-practice gap in elementary school: are tablets a feasible tool for informal math practice? |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5318409/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28270780 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00179 |
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