Robert Pasnak

The purpose of this project is to replicate the efficacy of an advanced patterning intervention, previously shown to improve first-grade students' math, literacy, and higher-order thinking skills, with kindergarten students. "Patterning" is the ability to recognize an ordering of numbers, letters, shapes, symbols, objects, or events according to some rule of progression. This project builds on the research team's three prior IES grants (Increasing Learning By Promoting Early Abstract Thought...

"Patterning" is the ability to recognize an ordering of numbers, letters, shapes, symbols, objects, or events according to some rule of progression. Understanding the place of an item in a pattern depends on understanding how it is related to items just preceding or following it. By first grade, children are expected to be developing the ability to understand patterns involving orientation or rotation, temporal and causal patterns of activities or events, and repetitive arbitrary patterns of...

Differences in student learning in reading and mathematics between children living in poverty and those who are not are apparent in kindergarten and persist as children progress through school. To address the challenge of improving learning outcomes for young children, in a previously funded IES project, Pasnak and Kidd developed a cognitive intervention for children who had difficulty mastering knowledge and skills appropriate for kindergarten. The cognitive intervention consists of small...

In this project, the researchers purposed to measure the impact of using an education intervention designed to enhance two particular forms of abstract thinking in young children's learning and achievement. The two particular abstract principles-learning to figure out which object in a group is unlike the others (the oddity principle) and knowing how to insert an appropriate object into a pre-given series of objects (seriation)-are forms of abstract thinking that are especially important in ...