Constance Kamii

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is missing citations and/or footnotes.

This article or section contains insufficiently sourced phrases. Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. You may improve the article or discuss this issue on the talk page. Help on using footnotes is available. This article has been tagged since December 2006.

There are very few or no other articles that link to this one.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. After links have been created, remove this message.
This article has been tagged since July 2006.

Constance Kamii is a professor of early childhood education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

[edit] Overview

Kamii studied under Jean Piaget on and off for 15 years to develop an early childhood curriculum based on his theory. This work can be seen in Physical Knowledge in Preschool Education (1978) and Group Games in Early Education (1980), which she wrote with Rheta Devries, and Number in Preschool and Kindergarten (1982). Since 1980, she has been developing a primary arithmetic program based on Piaget's theory and is now continuing this work with fourth-grade teachers in a constructivist "school within a school."

[edit] The Harmful Effects of Algorithms in Grades 1-4

see main article The Harmful Effects of Algorithms in Grades 1-4

One of her most cited papers proposed that teaching one of the 3R's, arithmetic was actually harmful to learning mathematics. This paper was widely cited worldwide. These ideas influenced the NCTM standards which would be funded by the United States National Science Foundation to create several curricula cited as examplary by the Department of Education and widely adopted by local, state, and federal education agencies by the 1990s and 2000s by consensus based decision making. Meanwhile, groups such as Mathematically Correct, composed largely of people who actually used mathematics rather than teach mathematics for a living were horrified that many of the NCTM-inspired texts such as Investigations in Number, Data, and Space not only omitted standard arithmetic methods, but instructed teachers to not even permit use of such methods even if learned at home.

In 2000, and later in 2006, the NCTM would largely renounce the idea of omitting the teaching of basic facts and methods. However, the influence of Kamii's research remains wide as parents across the United States continue to grapple with mathematics curricula that ask students and parents to construct their own mathematical power rather than simply be taught the same methods that were taught today's parents and the technologists who built the technologies of the 21st century.