Constance Kamii

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes.
Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (December 2006)

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

1 Overview
2 The Harmful Effects of Algorithms in Grades 1-4
3 References
4 External Links

[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 (Kamii, C., & Dominick, A. 1998) proposed that the traditional methods of 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 exemplary 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. While the NCTM and many other groups composed of educators and psychologists saw that Kamii's research resonated with their own experiences with children, groups such as Mathematically Correct, composed largely of practicing mathematicians with no elementary classroom experience were horrified that many of the NCTM-inspired texts such as Investigations in Number, Data, and Space omitted standard arithmetic methods.

The teaching of procedural knowledge, as the main purpose of mathematics classes, was challenged by Kamii's research. Interviews and assessments with students who had learned arithmetic as a set of procedures demonstrated profound conceptual misunderstandings about place value and number magnitude.

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 to today's parents.