Indigenous Children’s Ability to Pattern as They Enter Kindergarten/Pre-prep Settings: An Exploratory Study

The gap between young Indigenous and non-Indigenous children’s capability within mathematics is widely acknowledged. This gap is conjectured to exist at all levels of schooling, including pre-school, and widens as children mature. Most of these findings are based on research relating to children’s understanding of number and space. Little is known about what knowledge Indigenous students bring to early years settings with regard to patterning, an area that is widely acknowledged as fundamental to the development of concepts, process and knowledge of mathematics. One on one interviews were conducted with 35 Indigenous children (average age 4 years and 4 months) as they entered kindergarten. The results indicate that these children do enter these settings with some intuitive understanding of repeating pattern, and that this knowledge is at odds with the hypothesised learning trajectory (Samara & Clements, 2009) for repeating patterns.