Studying the effectiveness of phonological awareness training on the performance of mathematical applications

Abstract

AbstractThe domain of application is the highest level of performance in mathematics. It includes measurement, time and money, estimation and problem-solving. Problem-solving is the essence of mathematics and students should be able to solve problems after teaching and learning mathematical concepts. In this regard, this research tries to study the effect of phonological awareness training on the performance of second-grade elementary school students in mathematical application. The current research was conducted on 140 second-grade female students of Quchan elementary school in 1401-1402 with the average age of 7.6. Among these, 70 were selected as the experimental group and 70 as the control group. The experimental group was exposed to phonological awareness training during 10 sessions. Both groups were pre-tested and post-tested in the field of phonological awareness and mathematical application. The results showed that teaching phonological awareness has a significant effect on mathematical application of female students of second grade. This result is in line with the results of other studies conducted outside Iran in this field. But the difference aspect of this research with others was the division of phonological awareness based on age and considering the field of application for math test.Keywords: Phonemic Awareness, Mathematical Application Area, Second Grade Elementary School Student IntroductionReading is an important tool to communicate and convey ideas. Human being can decode the written information of various books, magazines, etc. through reading. The result of the development of reading and writing is the creation of phonological awareness that, in turn, leads to progress in other skills. Many studies have shown that phonological awareness is one of the most important predictors of early learning for reading (Vloedgraven & Verhoeven, 2009, p. 161). Phonological awareness is a predictor of decoding variables and word recognition ability (Durand et al., 2005, p. 114).Besides, long-term studies have shown that phonemic skills predict future math skills. Thus, phonemic awareness assessed in 4-5-year-old children is related to math skills at the beginning of the first grade. It also predicts math skills one year later (Simmons et al., 2007, p. 7-12).Research in different languages show that there is a two-way relationship between phonological awareness and learning (Soleimani et al., 2007:24). Therefore, if learners suffer from a disorder in the phonological awareness skill, they will face problems in learning other skills such as reading, writing and other sciences. Among the three dimensions of phonological ability including phonological awareness, phonological encoding in short-term memory and phonological retrieval in long-term memory (Passolunghi et al., 2007:166), phonological awareness is the most important predictor of math performance (Hecht et al., 2001:193). The present study could probably seem important in the context of Iran simply because not much research has been conducted to examine the effect of phonological awareness on math performance. Materials and MethodsTo examine the phonemic awareness skills of the participants, a phonemic awareness test was administered to both control and experimental groups. This test was performed based on the phonological awareness test of Dastjerdi-Kazemi and Soleimani (2009) which is comprised of of three parts: syllabic awareness, intersyllabic awareness and phonemic awareness. The test also involves ten sub-tests which are appropriate for the age-groups of 4 to 8 years. Therefore, according to the age limitation, only five of the ten sub-tests were used. In the present study, we employed the sub-tests of naming and deleting the initial phoneme, sub-test of naming and deleting the final phoneme, sub-test of identifying words with the same final phoneme, sub-test of deleting the middle phoneme and sub-test of phoneme segmentation. Furthermore, the performance of the mathematical application is considered as a variable. In order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the subjects, teacher-made tests were used based on the key- math test. The teacher-made math test includes questions from all the three areas of operation, concepts and application, which were designed by experts and specialists.Students were randomly placed in two control and experimental groups. In this way, after performing the diagnostic tests (phonemic and mathematical awareness test), 70 of students were chosen as the experimental group (the subjects who were exposed to phonemic awareness) and 70 students were chosen as the control group (the subjects were not exposed to phonemic awareness). The students who were selected as the experimental group were exposed to phonemic awareness training during ten sessions of 30-35 minutes (one session per week) but the control group did not receive any intervention. The experimental group was trained in groups of five. Then, in order to study the effect of phonemic awareness training, during a three-month break due to the lack of access of the researcher to the subjects, from both experimental and control groups, a math test and phonemic awareness test was performed as a post-test. The obtained results were analyzed based on descriptive and analytic statistics. Discussion of Results and ConclusionIn order to analyze the research hypothesis, Shapiro-Wilk tests were used to check the normality of the distribution of the control and experimental group scores, Levine's test was used for equality of variances, and finally covariance was used for removing of intervening variables from the dependent variable.In descriptive statistics, the skewness and kurtosis indices were used in both control and experimental groups to check normality. According to the results of the control group in the pre-test, the average application score is 3.243 and in the post-test is 3.443, and in the experimental group, in the pre-test, the average math application score is 171.3 and in the post-test is 4.700.Based on the obtained results, the meaningful level of the test related to the application variable in the control group and the experimental group in the pre-test and post-test is more than 0.05, so it can be said that the variable under investigation in the statistical sample has a normal distribution.Based on the results of group variable, the value of F statistic is equal to 175.55 and the meaningful level is less than 0.001. As a result, with 99% confidence, it can be said that there is a meaningful difference in the application of mathematics in the experimental and control groups; therefore, according to the averages, the score of the application of mathematics in the experimental group is higher than that of the control group. Thus, it can be argued that phonemic awareness has a significant effect on the math application test of second grade female students. What’s more, an effect size of 0.562 was obtained, which is a large effect size based on Cohen's criterion.The results suggest that phonemic awareness affects the mathematical application in female students of the second grade of elementary school. Therefore, there is a meaningful difference in mathematical application between the two groups of experimental and control groups. The results of this research are in line with the results of Leder and Henry (1994), Hetch (2001), Alloway (2005), Kuzmina (2019), Corti and Warmington (2021). These studies indicate that phonemic awareness is a strong predictor of math development. The different aspect of the present research from the previous researches is that in none of these researches, the effectiveness of phonemic awareness skills on mathematical performance has not been studied, different areas of phonemic awareness skills have not been investigated and only the correlation between them has been considered.Understanding mathematical problems requires a complex interaction of understanding text and mathematical processes (Swanson, 2004, p. 649). Phonemic awareness enhances basic math skills and the phonological working memory represents the degree of access to phonological codes (De Smedt, 2010, p. 510). Therefore, phonemic awareness works indirectly so that the improvement of phonemic awareness affects the understanding of mathematical problems that require the intervention of working memory. This is because working memory, in turn, has an effect on both basic stages of acquiring numerical knowledge and problem-solving skills.

Keywords

• phonemic awareness
• mathematical application area
• second grade elementary school student