EARLY NUMERACY INTERVENTION: ONE STATE’S RESPONSE TO IMPROVING MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT

A significant number of children struggle with quantitative ideas during the first few years of their academic careers and fail to construct a meaningful sense of number. These early struggles, if not addressed, can limit students’ mathematics performance as they move through the grade levels. If these struggling students are fortunate enough to receive intervention services, most often they are provided too late and are provided by teachers with little knowledge of numeracy development. Duncan et al (2006) identified the predictive power of early mathematics knowledge and found that knowledge of numbers and ordinality were the most powerful predictor of later learning. The study recommends future research to identify “promising early math interventions” (p. 21).