The Content Analysis And Inspirations Of The Domain Of Mathematics In Early Learning Standards From All The States In American

In recent years,more and more attention has been paid to early childhood mathematics education. At the same time,many of the developed countries have launched movements of early learning standards(ELSs). As one of the contents that has been covered first in the ELSs,mathematics standards have exerted great influence on early childhood mathematics education.With content analysis method,the paper analyzes the specific indicators in the domain of math in 51ELSs documents from all the states(a district) in the USA, and interprets the contents of math domain for exploring advanced mathematics education concepts. Based on the previous analysis, a comparison of math domain between 51ELSs documents and Guidelines of Learning and Development for 3-6 Years Old has been made,from which we can extract some useful experience and put forward some suggestions for early childhood math education in our country.The research shows that the domain of math mainly contains such sub-domains called numbers and operations, sets and patterns, geometry and spatial relationship, measurement, data analysis and probability. The quantity of indicators in numbers and operations ranks first,then comes the geometry and spatial relationship, and data analysis and probability comes the last. Theoretically,the emphasis of the standards from all the states is to explore number concepts and encourage created writing of numbers; to develop counting principles and movements; to realize the importance of the number relationships in operations and to follow the rules of early childhood learning in operations;to realize the importance of sets in math learning and obey the rules of pattern recognition in early childhood learning;to enrich children’s experience of geometry and improve the level of geometrical thinking and ability of space perception; to master the basic elements in measurement and value the practical experience of measurement; to pay attention to the comprehensiveness and applicability of statistics in developing children’s problem solving ability.We can find some differences between the American standards and the Chinese Guideline in the form of text structure, content structure and the specific content of mathematics.At last, this paper concludes some inspirations for early childhood mathematics education in our country:Early childhood mathematics education should develop children’s thinking for the purpose, and value the importance of understanding and using basic concepts and skills;should increase the chances of children’s material operations for enriching practical experience in the math activities;should guarantee the systematicness and completeness of mathematical material as well as the timing and order;should improve teachers’ accuracy of using mathematical language and encourage children to communicate and express creatively in mathematics, In addition, this article also put forward some suggestions for early mathematics learning standards:the content of domain should be comprehensive and balanced, with the key points emphasized and indicators should be appropriately more specific to improve operability; an active style of layout can be adopted in the text for improving the readability of math standards; Structure of content should be ricer for increasing comprehensiveness of the instruction in mathematics; the standards should be designed integrated for providing a systematic support for early childhood mathematics education.