The gender and the teaching style influence over the mathematics and communication results in pre-school education

Abstract

The teaching style represents the manner in which the teacher presents the information to the children after they have received their own imprint. Mathematical Activity (MA) and Communication Activity (CA) are the basis of future mathematical and communicative knowledge in preschool education. For this reason, MA and CA are given an essential place in the program carried out in kindergarten. The literature revealed a lot of factors that interact with results in preschool education, but there is a lack of studies that include both variables, teachers’ teaching style, and children’s gender, in the equation. The purpose of this study was to investigate how children’s gender and teachers’ teaching styles are influencing preschoolers’ results in MA and CA. The research followed a quantitative design and was carried out in the 2021-2022 school year in several kindergartens belonging to the Adventist Church in Romania. The sample comprised 111 preschoolers between 5-6 years old, organized into 9 groups and their teachers. The applied tools were represented by the Teaching for Successful Intelligence Questionnaire (Paloș & Maricuțoiu, 2013) for the variable teaching style and the questionnaire with questions for educators for the variable gender of children. The instruments used for the dependent variables, the partial results at MA and CA, were called the Competition Sheet. After applying the tools, the data was analyzed using the T-test for independent samples and One-Way ANOVA. The results obtained after the data analysis mention that, according to gender, there are no significant differences between the results obtained by girls and boys at MA and CA. The research conclusion mentions that all four of the teachers’ teaching styles—the creative, the reproductive, the analytical, and the practical styles—influenced the preschoolers’ results in MA but did not influence their results in CA.

Keywords

• Teaching style
• gender
• preschoolers
• communication activity
• mathematical activity