Growing Mathematical Minds

Jennifer McCray is a Research Scientist and the Director of the Early Math Collaborative at Erikson Institute. Jie-Qi Chen is the Principal Investigator of the Early Math Collaborative and a professor of child development at Erikson Institute. Dr. Chen has co-authored and co-edited seven books in the fields of child development, educational reform, classroom assessment, and early mathematics. Janet Eisenband Sorkin is Senior Assessment Development Associate for Mathematics at the University of Chicago.

• Introduction: Briding the Gap Between Research and Practice in Early Mathematics Jie-Qi Chen, Jennifer S. McCray, and Janet Eisenband Sorkin Chapter 1: Mathematical Language and Early Math Learning Janet Eisenband Sorkin and Jennifer S. McCray with Susan Levine Chapter 2: The Role of Adult and Environmental Input in Children’s Math Learning Donna Johnson & Lisa Ginet with Kelly Mix Chapter 3: The Use of Concrete Objects in Early Mathematical Learning Jie-Qi Chen and Jeanine Brownell with David Uttal Chapter 4: The Role of Gesture in Teaching and Learning Math Mary Hynes-Berry and Jennifer S. McCray with Susan Goldin-Meadow Chapter 5: Variability in Children’s Mathematical Thinking and Learning Laura Grandau and Rebeca Itzkowich with Robert Siegler Chapter 6: Pathways to Basic Combination Fluency in the Primary Grades Jeanine O’Nan Brownell & Mary Hynes-Berry with Arthur J. Baroody Chapter 7: Math Anxiety and Math Performance: How do they relate? Lisa Ginet and Rebeca Itzkowich with Erin Maloney Conclusion Jennifer S. McCray, Janet Eisenband Sorkin, and Jie-Qi Chen

"Growing Mathematical Minds is a remarkable, lucid, and inviting introduction to early math education. The book offers prominent researchers’ accounts of their own fundamental work on children’s mathematical thinking, as well teachers’ comments on the research and suggestions about the ways it can be used to inform classroom practice. The book truly helps both researchers and teachers to bridge the sometimes considerable gap between theory and practice, in part by listening and responding to each other."—Herbert Ginsburg, Jacob H. Schiff Foundations Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA "With this book, Dr. McCray and her co-authors do a real service both to educators and to researchers in the field of early mathematics learning. There is now so much to know about early math education that we spend our careers becoming experts in just one thing: We either know how to teach math, or we know how to do research on it. But because teachers and researchers don’t spend much time in each other’s worlds, a gulf arises. Math researchers (like me) want our work to be useful, but we don’t actually know what teachers need. Teachers want to stay up to date on the relevant research, but much of that research is embargoed behind paywalls-- and even if it weren’t, what teacher has time to read through it all to figure out what’s relevant? In this book, Dr. McCray and her co-authors have boiled the current research down to its most important insights, and presented them in a way that is immediately usable in classrooms. This is the missing link that we all need, in order to reach our shared goal of using research to improve early math education."—Barbara Sarnecka, Associate Professor, Cognitive Sciences and Logic & Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine, USA