Analysis of Preschool Teachers’ Dialogue with Children During Combinatorial Activities

This article deals with the quality of dialogue between preschool teachers and children during mathematical activities. Thoughtful and attentive dialogue captures children’s attention and allows them to reason, express thoughts and disagreements, and ask questions. The aim of the study is to determine how well preschool teachers are able to utilize the potential of a combinatorial problem to ask questions and promote children’s mathematical thinking. Video recordings of eleven preschool teachers formed the basis of the study. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the transcribed recordings provided an insight into the quality of the dialogues. The results of the study show that the preschool teachers mainly focused on combinatorics during the dialogue, although they also frequently asked the children questions about numbers, as well as questions from a non-mathematical context. In the analyzed dialogues, there was a lack of focusing questions, problem-solving questions, and questions requiring the children to justify their explanations. Unlike other studies that mainly investigate children’s thinking when solving selected combinatorial problems, the present study highlights the role of the teacher as the main actor in the process of children’s mathematics learning.