Abstract

ACOSTA-INCHAUSTEGUI, Yeni  and  ALSINA, Ángel. Influence of the teaching context on pattern representation in early childhood education. Alteridad [online]. 2022, vol.17, n.2, pp.166-179. ISSN 1390-8642.  https://doi.org/10.17163/alt.v17n2.2022.01.

According to the Mathematics Teaching Itineraries Approach (EIEM), which proposes intentional teaching sequences from the concrete to the symbolic, we analyse how the teaching context influences the repetition pattern tasks in a group of 24 children during two consecutive school years (4-6 years old). For this purpose, repetition pattern tasks have been implemented in the two extreme contexts of a previously designed and validated itinerary: real situations and graphic contexts, respectively. The data have been analysed from ethnographic methodological schemes of participant observation (field diary); pedagogical documentation (audiovisual record); and written productions of the patterns (representations). The main results obtained show that: a) in pupils aged 4-5 years, a positive difference of 32.9% of real situations versus graphic resources has been identified; b) in pupils aged 5-6 years, although the difference between the two contexts decreases slightly, it continues to be above 30%. It is concluded that the teaching context influences the understanding of repetition patterns, so that it is necessary to teach patterns from the situational to the formal level.

Keywords : Repetition patterns; representation in mathematics; real situations; graphical resources; early childhood education.

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