Learning To Guide Preschool Children's Mathematical Understanding: A Teacher's Professional Growth.

that young children need play-based opportunities to develop and deepen their conceptual understanding of mathematics. From a social-constructivist perspective, learning is more likely to occur if adults or more-competent peers mediate children's learning experiences. Emphasizing both the developmental and the curricular perspectives, this article focuses on the role of the teacher in guiding preschool children's mathematical learning while they play with everyday materials. Professional growth in three areas was identified as critical in teachers ' learning to guide young children's learning of mathematical concepts. The three areas are: the ability to recognize children's demonstrated understanding of mathematical concepts; the ability to use mathematical language to guide their progress from behavioral to representational understanding of mathematical concepts; and the ability to assess systematically children's understanding of mathematical concepts. Checklists tracing the development of three fundamental mathematical concepts--one-to-one correspondence, classification, and seriation--ar