Konstantinos Zacharos

University of Patras | UP · Department of Educational Sciences and Early Childhood Education

Our research programme, a part of which is presented in this paper, looked at four year old children's ability to use manipulatives in the construction of cube models. We looked at how preschool children managed the creation of cube nets as a mathematical problem and whether graphical representations of solutions could become a useful tool in a chi...

Only a limited number of research has examined preservice preschool teachers’ attitudes toward and beliefs about teaching mathematics, likely because there are no instruments aimed at preschool settings that have appropriately established psychometric properties. In the current study, we addressed this deficit and aimed to adapt the Preschool Teach...

This study aims to analyse the content of school Mathematics textbooks, based on whether they are cross-thematic in character, or not. In other words, it examines the connection of the mathematics content to knowledges drawn from other school subjects, something that is promoted as much by the curricula of Greek compulsory education, as by the inst...

Contemporary mathematics curricula introduce probabilistic activities as early as preschool. Through a long term preschool teacher professional development programme we tried to investigate preschool teachers' beliefs about teaching probability in preschool as well as their self-efficacy probabilistic teaching beliefs and whether these beliefs were...

How can research on mathematics education in preschool have a larger impact on the quality of everyday classroom practice? In what ways can research in mathematics education in preschool influence the quality of everyday classroom practice? The aim of this paper is to present how research findings in preschool mathematics education, concerning teac...

Could creative problem solving be the object of work in preschool education? This study followed the work of fifteen, four and five year old children and their teacher during a two month process of solving combinatorial problems with a large number of solutions. Findings show that all children responded positively to the problems, were successful i...

This article presents a research work aimed to study the role of computational tools in the conceptualization of algebraic properties according to the conceptual framework of instrumental genesis and the Design-Function-Tasks (DeFT) framework of multiple representations at Junior high school level. It concerns a didactical approach which takes adva...

This paper investigates five and six-year old children's ability to employ logical reasoning in their in-class argumentation. Thirteen preschool children participated in the study. The children were involved in organized dialogues in order to investigate their ability to construct logical arguments. A simplified version of Toulmin's argumentation s...

This paper attempts to investigate five and six-year old children's ability to formulate logical reasoning. More specifically, our interest focuses on the investigation of young children's ability to use arguments based on logical reasoning. Can preschool children build arguments based on logical reasoning such as deductive reasoning, or forms of i...

ABSTRACT This paper investigates five and six-year old children’s ability to employ logical reasoning in their in-class argumentation. Thirteen pre-school children participated in the study. The children were involved in organized dialogues in order to investigate their ability to construct logical arguments. A simplified version of Toulmin’s argum...

This article presents a case study that examines the level of integration of mathematical knowledge in physics problem solving among first grade students of upper secondary school. We explore the ways in which two specific students utilize their knowledge and we attempt to identify the epistemological framings they refer to while solving a physics...

Do early childhood education children comprehend photographs as spatial representations and are they able to use them to obtain information about space? Can they identify the location from where the shooting was done? Can they use photographs to identify the positions where objects are located? These are the research questions that this paper aims...

In this paper we aim to study the forms of verbal communication between four year old children while occupied with the mathematical problem solving process. We also look at the possibility of peer language interaction contributing to the mathematical problem solving process. RÉSUMÉ Dans cet article, nous nous efforçons d'étudier les formes de commu...

This paper deals with the attempt to study four-year old children's potential to engage in the mathematical problem solving process and their ability to construct mathematical meaning through their engagement with the process. We studied: (a) whether teaching could contribute to the development of the essential cognitive skills for solving a mathem...

The empirical material of this preliminary study was drawn from the recording and analysis of teaching activities used during the implementation of the new pre-school Greek curriculum in sixteen classes of public kindergartens. More specifically, according to the opinion of the kindergarten teachers about the social backgrounds of the majority of t...

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to development of research tools for observation and analysis of educational practices used by teachers in preschool classrooms. More specifically, we approached the implemented curriculum of mathematics in Greek preschool education. We analysed the recorded data from a week of teaching practices in eight...

One of the research and teaching interests in early childhood education is the understanding of spatial concepts and orientation in space. The present study, which is a pilot study, attempts to investigate whether pre-school students can recognize familiar locations in photographs, the locations being in this case parts of their schoolyard, and fur...

One of the research and teaching interests in early childhood education is the understanding of spatial concepts and orientation in space. The present study, which is a pilot study, attempts to investigate whether preschool students can recognize familiar locations in photographs, the locations being in this case parts of their schoolyard, and furt...

The teaching of Probability Theory constitutes a new trend in mathematics education internationally. The purpose of this research project was to explore the degree to which preschoolers understand key concepts of probabilistic thinking, such as sample space, the probability of an event and probability comparisons. At the same time, we evaluated an...

Could problem solving be the object of teaching in early education? Could appropriate teaching interventions develop to scaffold children's efforts to solve problems? These were the central questions of this article. The sample consisted of 18 children attending public pre-school in Cyprus. The problem they were asked to solve was to find all solut...

Could measurement of length be the object of teaching in early education? Could appropriate teaching interventions develop as to scaffold children's efforts to measure lengths? These are the central questions of this paper. The sample consisted of 84 children of six public preschool classrooms and the teaching intervention included two different ki...

In this study we attempted to highlight the pedagogical role of activities to familiarize pre-schoolers with the measurement processes of container capacity. The sample of the study consisted of 20 subjects aged five-six, all coming from two Greek state kindergartens of the same area, bearing the same middle socioeconomic background. The research w...

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the changes that took place in school mathematics knowledge for pupils aged six and seven (first grade of Greek elementary school) and its pedagogical approach, which took shape following the reforms of the mathematics curricula in 1982 and 2003. Our analysis is based on Bernstein’s theoretical fra...

The reference contexts that accompany the “realistic” problems chosen for teaching mathematical concepts in the first school grades play a major educational role. However, choosing “realistic” problems in teaching is a complex process that must take into account various pedagogical, sociological and psychological parameters. This paper presents a s...

In this study we have utilised Basil Bernstein's theoretical framework regarding pedagogic discourse and have aimed at a comparative approach to the way school mathematics were taught in the period when 6-year-old pupils begin to attend Greek primary school between 1982-2009.

The study of pupils’ representations of physics concepts and phenomena constitutes a centralpart of Science Education research, as they play a decisive role in teaching. In the study presented here,we investigate 212 fifth grade pupils’ mental representations of the formation of shadows, before theywere taught about it in school. The empirical data...

The questions this paper attempts to answer are related to the attitudes of student teachers of the Department of Early Childhood Education at the University of Patras (Greece) towards mathematics, as well as their views on the instruction of mathematics in Early Childhood Education. The research sample included 52 students in the fourth semester o...

The present research was carried out with the participation of 106 students in their last grade in Elementary School and revealed certain problems that these students faced in understanding the concept of area measurement. The students in the sample persisted on using measurement strategies that often led to failure.Our research plan comprises a co...

Social and cultural parameters in teaching mathematical concepts in early childhood education in Greece The present research has been carried out withtook place in the individual interviews and attempted preschool students from two different socialcultural groups: Roma and non-Roma. Students to answer in the specific tasks with mathematical content...

The aim of this research is to investigate the potentialities of teaching the concept of measuring surfaces to children of early school ages. The subjects of our research use the strategy of covering the measured surface. This strategy develops some meanings coming from mathematical tradition and psychological research. 131 subjects with the same s...