A diagnostic test can help Grade 1 teachers in South Africa see who is struggling with mathematics and how to help them, including identifying challenges with terminology owing to different home languages, a study by University of Johannesburg (UJ) and University of Helsinki researchers, published in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly journal, shows.

A 15-week intervention programme linked to the test provided teachers with material to support children efficiently. Enabling teachers to find out what individual support each child needs to progress in mathematics can make a big difference in how they cope with everyday challenges, including the challenges of terminology, the researchers say.

The research team enrolled 207 Grade 1 children at four public schools and another 60 children at three middle-income private schools. The schools are in the greater Johannesburg area. Of the 267 children, 79 said they speak English at home, while others speak Setswana, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and other languages. Some of the children were from immigrant families.

“The most important result in our study was that the children who had extra practice in early numeracy skills with the 15-week intervention programme had a bigger and sustained increase in their numerical relational skills. This was much better than for children who followed the usual instruction,” says University of Helsinki Department of Education professor Pirjo Aunio.

“The effect was not the result of better language or executive functions skills, nor Grade R attendance, but a result of the intervention programme. The 15-week programme’s materials are cheap and easy to use and it is, therefore, potentially useful on a large scale as well,”  she notes.

Aunio developed the original Finnish test and the 15-week, 1-hour-a-week mathematics boost programme for Grade 1 learners.

UJ Institute for Childhood Education professor, Centre for Education Practice Research director and National Research Foundation South Africa Research chair Elizabeth Henning is one of the researchers in the study who adapted this Finnish evidence-based test for children in Grade 1, where the medium of instruction is English.

“Six-year-olds cannot explain the problems they may experience with mathematics and it is difficult for Grade 1 teachers to know who is keeping up and who is not. When children come to school, even for Grade 1, it is difficult to know what they already know.

“At home, children see their family members bake and cook and work, and they learn early numeracy informally with lots of ‘number talk’. Many children learn basic mathematics in their home languages, while others do not because their parents send them to schools where English is the classroom language,” Henning points out.

“Then the children come to primary school and must ‘parallel track’ if their school teaches through medium of English, meaning they start learning the same concepts in a new language. They get to know mathematics terms in English. When Grade 1 teachers do not speak the home languages of the young children, it is not possible for them to translate or code-switch when they see the kids struggling,” she explains.

Measuring numeracy along with other relevant control measures in a school-based intervention is a unique feature of the test, says Aunio.

“If we test a Grade 1 child, we may not get a reliable outcome if we only test their numeracy without any other measure at the same time. We also need to assess their listening comprehension - to see if they understand the language in its spoken form - and their executive function skills and record whether they had been to school in Grade R. Testing children for different competencies helps researchers to get an idea of what learning support they may have already had, and what they may need,” she concluded.