Running head: Math Journal Research

Math Journals in Kindergarten

Anna Henslee

Kennesaw State University

ECE 7531

Dr. Digiovanni

November, 10, 2014

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Abstract

Mathematics is a difficult subject for Kindergarten age students. This study will delve

into ways to improve students understanding of math concepts. Reading and Writing will be

added into the regular Math Workshop each day to enhance student learning. Students will use

Math Journal entries weekly to express their understanding of the topic of addition and

subtraction.

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Introduction

Kindergarten is a great place to lay the foundation for learning. There are many skills

that are very important in Kindergarten, such as reading, writing, and math. All of the skills

taught to Kindergarteners will be the foundation that the rest of their education will stand on.

The job of a Kindergarten teacher must be taken seriously since Kindergarten is where they

learn to read and write and those two skills are necessary in every other area of school and in

life. Students must learn a very daunting amount of information in Kindergarten considering

their mental and physical abilities at that developmental stage of life. It is for this reason that

teachers must use all of our critical skills as much as possible in order to harvest good results.

One of the problems in education is separation of student activities into distinct

categories in which they only learn reading during reading or math during math. This is a

disservice to students and there could be so much more instruction done if it was integrated

more smoothly between reading and writing instruction into other subject areas. Students also

need the chance to practice the reading and writing skills they are learning and also synthesize

the learning going on in math by writing about the topic. The question being asked in this study

is:

How does using Math Journals affect student learning and understanding of concepts?

In answering this question, students will use reading and writing strategies such as Math

Journals in order to add another dimension to student learning and record the results it brings.

Students will use the Math Journals in a small group setting with teacher modeling at first. At

first, students will work in journals independently as they understand the correct way to use

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them. The students will write in the journals once a week for consistent exposure to explaining

their Math thinking. The students will be seeing Math Journals used in this way for the first time

during this study. The students have used Math journals this year only to practice writing

numbers.

Literature Review

Reading and writing are crucial skills every student needs to have in order to be

successful in all other aspects of their education. Students often have difficulty at a young age

learning to read and write. In order to supplement these learning difficulties, classes should add

more reading and writing into the educational day. Some students even resent reading at first,

and previous research discusses,

“From storybook reading, a child obtained a familiarity with reading text, a positive

attitude toward literacy, and developed a knowledge base for future literacy learning.

Through the development of a positive attitude toward reading through storybook

reading, children began to develop a connection with storybooks leading to the

development of future reading skills” (LaCour, McDonald, Tissington, & Thomason,

2013, p. 1).

We can increase our students’ desire to learn to read by integrating storybook reading

throughout all subject areas so we can attempt to improve their attitude about reading.

Waznek argues that educators are not necessarily giving students enough time exposed to

print. “Despite the importance of student instruction and practice with print, observational

studies through the years suggest students are provided limited opportunities to actively

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engage with print and text in school” (Waznek, 2014, p.2). Also being researched is the

resources for teaching emergent readers and writers to find correlations between the two.

Teachers can give students more opportunities to increase their reading and writing skills by

reinforcing these skills during social math. Reading and writing are the ways students show

mastery in all areas which is a great reason we should be sure the two are integrated in all

areas of learning. Not only does integrating reading and writing increase reading and writing

skills, but it also helps students reinforce the content knowledge they are reading or writing

about in other subjects.

One of the important things to teach emerging readers, is how to make connections to

what they hear in a text to something that they already know or experienced. One teacher

taught her students this by calling it a “Velcro Theory” in one of the research articles, “She

explained that when we get a new piece of information, it’s easier to remember if we can stick

it onto something that’s already in our heads; making this connection helps us to understand

what we are reading” (Gregory & Cahill, 2010, p. 2). As she is explaining here, you see into the

minds of little young emergent readers. They have to have some known information that is

familiar to them to latch new information to in order to be successful making meaning out of

what they are reading. This strategy can start very young even before reading takes place.

Young readers and writers become very aware of print before they are reading and writing

independently when they are exposed to print. “Likewise the above example suggests that

while Eric is not able to read or decode words in a conventional sense, he employs

environmental print, recognizes the symbol for the grocery store, and applies it to his own

experience” (Lee, 2011, p. 1). Students have background knowledge about print that we must

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pull from when teaching them how to read and write. When we teach them strategies that help

them connect old knowledge to new knowledge, we see their brains ready for more learning.

Another strategy that helps emergent readers discussed in this study was visualization while

listening to a story or reading a story. At this young age, most strategies are taught while

students listen to a teacher do the reading since it takes so much concentration for a student to

actually decode and read words. We want to focus first on giving them tools to use when

reading. When teaching visualization, it is often easy to have students close their eyes and

imagine what the illustrations would be like in this story when they open their eyes. Along with

making connections, and visualizing, it is crucial to teach students how to question their text.

Throughout Kindergarten, students are taught that asking and answering questions about a

book helps them understand what they read. In this study, an example is used where a teacher

would create anchor charts at the beginning of the story with the questions students had. After

the story was read, they would discuss these questions and answer whether the question was

explicitly answered in the text of the book or if they needed to use their brains to answer the

questions using what they heard in the text. This is a way to explain inferring and questioning

to a child. These strategies mentioned in this study are crucial when teaching emergent

readers.

As we teach young readers, the strategies we are using often lend themselves to writing

or drawing about what they are reading. Students that learn to write their name early in

Kindergarten, tend to have a better chance of reading and writing quicker due to their

knowledge of letters and sounds written in their own name. Diamond and Baroody state,

“Children’s name writing in prekindergarten was associated, concurrently, with letter and word

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decoding skills” (Diamond & Baroody, 2013, p. 1). They go on to find the correlation between

letters in the student’s name and the way that helps the student better understand phonetic

letter sound representations. “Children’s use of letters when writing their name in

prekindergarten predicted growth of emergent literacy skills related to letter knowledge and to

decoding and identifying words, even if the name was not written entirely correctly” (Diamond

& Baroody, 2013, p. 1). Students are pushed to begin writing sentences without first focusing

on the developmentally appropriate skill of correctly writing their name. Reading and writing

are two extremely important skills that must be taught to young students first and foremost.

However, there are many other standards that are expected to be taught as well. In order to

give students a good foundation of these reading and writing skills while accomplishing the

other standards as well, reading and writing must be incorporated into the other subjects.

Does integrating reading and writing across the curriculum in fact increase reading and

writing knowledge as well as the content knowledge being taught? “That is, reading to learn

and investigate is rich with opportunities to encounter the very struggles that seem to catalyze

reading development and represent reading as the meaning-making process that it is” (Cervetti

& Pearson, 2012, p. 3). Another study conducted discusses the use of literature in teaching

mathematics and says, “Evidence clearly shows that using children’s literature to teach math is

a very effective method of instruction” (Tucker, Boggan & Harper, 2010, p.1). Simply reading

about Math in order to teach a subject like measurement can be so beneficial to the student’s

learning. Knipper and Duggan (2006) state, “Mastery of content is demonstrated not only

through reading but also through writing. Integrating writing with reading enhances

comprehension (Brandenburg, 2002) because the two are reciprocal processes” (Knipper &

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Duggan, 2006, p.1). Also said in that article, “Writing to learn engages students, extends

thinking, deepens understanding, and energizes the meaning-making process” (Knipper &

Duggan, 2006, p.1). One subject that is often overlooked is integrating writing into Math.

“That we see so few examples of the integration of writing and mathematics in

educational literature seems surprising, considering that the mathematics education

community has affirmed the importance of such integration for many years. As early as

1989, The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics identified learning to

communicate mathematically as a major goal for students” (Wilcox & Monroe, 2011,

p.1).

Math is typically the most difficult subject to integrate reading and writing, but it is

necessary for the greatest potential of students to emerge. Carter says, “Reading trade books

with mathematical themes is an excellent way to engage students with mathematical topics”

(Carter, 2009, p.1). Math journals are one example of unstructured ways to encourage writing,

as well as free writing journals. Research suggests that students need more unstructured time

to write rather than being asked to draw a picture and label with words all of the time. “Ray

further explained that teachers should stop asking children to perform limiting writing tasks,

such as drawing a picture and labeling it with an explanatory sentence. Ray advocated to

replace those activities with open-ended invitations for young writers to create books, so the

children can build their own writing identities” (Meyer, 2013, p.3). We want to encourage our

students as writers, but often our efforts are really stifling their creativity. No matter how young

they are, they have their own writing identities and we need to encourage them in that.

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Methodology

Due to the abundance in research about integrating subject matter, my research will be

done in a way that integrates reading and writing into math. When implementing Math

Journals, students will be graded on how well they are able to learn Math topics when asked to

add in writing about math through Math Journals. Students will use their skills reading and

writing to explain their thinking using Math Journals for mathematics topics. Informal

observations will be used to see if students develop larger vocabularies and abilities to explain

the standards taught once they have had to write about those topics in addition to the normal

activities related to the math standards. This research will take place in the middle of a

Kindergarten school year.

The intervention being put in place is Math Journals. Students will each be given a

journal for Math and they will use them during small group math instruction. They will use

these journals once a week to record their thinking in math. Students are still very young

writers at this stage of Kindergarten, so some students will be drawing and dictating their

writing. These journals will allow students to use what they know and take the learning one

step further by writing about what they have learned. The students will also be given a math

assessment to show progress on standards and after implementing journal writing, they will be

assessed to show whether the scores of those tests are improving or not.

The journal entries will be graded by using the report card rubric that judges each of

the standards and give students grades of 3, 2, or 1. The students will have the ability to see

what is expected in order to get a 3. I will create samples that students can visually relate to for

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better understanding of expectations of work that warrants a 3, 2, or a 1. Based on the

student’s previous score, the next journal will show growth in the standard taught. These

journal entries will be graded using informal observations about students’ vocabulary usage and

understanding of the topic by correct computation of math skill. The results from the content

journals will show whether the students improved in their knowledge about various topics

when they write about them. They will also show if students begin to write more thorough

entries as they have had more opportunities to write about their content standards. The Math

journals will show students thinking when solving math problems. They will judge how the

students correct use of math vocabulary and explanation of procedures progresses as the

students write more entries. The math pre-test and post-test will also show the amount of

progress students have made in their understanding of the topic of addition and subtraction.

Results

I conducted research on the use of Math Journals in Kindergarten. I used a rating scale

to score student journals from 1 to 3 each week according to how well they understood the

topic by the end of the journal prompt. I started by using the whole class to see how that went

as far as time. I found that using the journals with each child weekly was very time consuming. I

also took my own notes in a teacher journal to use as qualitative data. Lastly, I gave a pretest

for students on the topic that will be used most often in journals before starting the use of

journals and ended the research with a post-test to see student growth. The topic of the tests

and of the journals for the entire research period was addition and subtraction to 10.

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My quantitative data is the scores from the pre-test and post-test. I created a pre-test

and a post-test that would assess the students’ abilities to show problem solving skills with

addition and subtraction problems to 10. The test was 8 questions but the last two questions

were worth 20 points each. The first 6 questions were formatted so students looked at a

pictorial representation of addition or subtraction and wrote the accompanying number

sentence. Students seem to do better on questions like this where they can see the addition

problem shown in a picture. However, when subtraction questions are shown in picture form,

students have a very difficult time figuring out how to write the number sentence. The

difficulty students are having is remembering that the first number written is the whole amount

of objects shown. That feels backwards to students since addition puts the whole number last.

When using the math journals we tried to address this issue but it continues to confuse

students. When looking at the pre-test and post-test data I see some growth overall. However,

there are still some students that did not make large amounts of growth or even decreased

their score. The class average for the pre-test was 33% and the class average for the post-test

was 71.5%. The growth for the whole class is very high. However, I would love to see the post-

test average higher still. When creating the pre-test and post-test I tried to create questions

that would show me if the students had a full understanding of addition and subtraction to 10

in different situations such as pictures, number sentence, and word problems. For this reason,

some students were able to master the topic and show me in different ways and other students

may be able to use manipulatives to figure out a problem presented orally but had a harder

time drawing the representation and showing me on paper. As I look at the specific students

that did not score well on the post-test like student numbers 3, 4, 8, and 11 there are other

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indicators in place for why these students may not have benefitted from the Math Journals. For

example, a couple of those students are ESOL students who do not speak English as their first

language. This could cause some difficulties being successful in school. There is also one of

those students that is currently on the RTI process for being below grade level in several areas.

As you can see with the graph below, the overall scores went up after the use of Math Journals

for 4 weeks. I would say the general findings from the post-test scores is that the use of Math

Journals was effective to help enhance student performance in Math.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 130

20

40

60

80

100

120

Pre-test and Post-test Data

Pre-testPost-test

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Class Average0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Pre-testPost-test

For my qualitative data, I wrote notes in a teacher journal which I used to analyze what I

saw the students doing. When journaling I felt like each week the students were gaining some

understanding of addition and subtraction, but also showing some weaknesses that were

concerning after a significant amount of time on that topic. The focus of the journals was

addition and subtraction problems to 10 and some of them were word problems. While giving

students those tasks weekly, I came to the conclusion that some of the weaknesses I was seeing

were strictly from a developmental standpoint that students were struggling to understand the

concept of subtraction. I also came to the realization that anything that a teacher spends

quality amount of time on in small group instruction is going to help the group as a whole and

going to move most students forward in their understanding. I am unsure that the actual

journal was the thing that made students improve their understanding. I think it was more

about the amount of focused small group time the journals forced me to implement and the

extended amount of time we worked on one standard. At Kindergarten age, it is a shame that

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we are always feeling pushed to move forward instead of taking the amount of time students

need in order to really grasp a good foundation in number sense.

I also used student journals to make notes in and analyze by rating them each week on

a scale of 1 to 3. Each week I rated students’ journals a 1, 2, or 3 based on how well they

understood the topic and completed the task. The hard part of this rating scale is the students

all ended up getting either a 2 or 3 since I was helping them solve the problems and coaching

them in small group instruction. When truly assessing with the pre and post-tests we get a

more accurate view of exactly how much the students know. When I rated the journals, I was

using that time to teach, not test the students so they all scored well each week. I did have a

select group of students that had a harder time understanding the addition and subtraction

problems even with the help I was giving them which made their score lower than the rest of

their peers. However, with as much coaching as I was giving there were not any students that

got a 1 on their journal.

As I have studied the data presented from this research, I feel strongly that using the

Math Journals did help my students understanding of Math concepts, which in this case was

addition and subtraction. I also feel that Math Journals were a way to keep me accountable for

meeting with each student once a week if not more to make sure they got small group

instruction on the current topic. If a teacher spends dedicated time on one topic and uses

quality small group instruction consistently there will be definite growth.

Conclusions

After studying students’ ability to discuss addition and subtraction problems in Kindergarten

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before and after the use of Math Journals, the scores on the post assessment show that they

students understanding improved tremendously. Students were able to see more clearly when

to add and subtract in word problems and they were able to draw pictorial representations of

the addition and subtraction problems and write a number sentence to accompany it. The

benefit of working weekly small group with a teacher and other students around the same level

as each other was a positive benefit for students as well while journals were implemented, to

have discussions about the problems and correct common errors.

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