"ISU is a great place to work; I especially enjoy my time with the students. They are wonderful to interact with and show a true dedication to becoming our country's future educators. I am glad that I can share my passion for child development with them and enhance their knowledge of how children learn." — Alan Bates, assistant professor, Curriculum and Instruction
(December 4, 2006) Alan Bates is very interested in how preschoolers develop their mathematical skills through interactions with their parents, caregivers, and teachers. In teaching C&I 210: Child Growth and Development and C&I 275: Early Childhood Math and Science, he makes sure that future teachers understand the impact that they will have on their young students.
This is the second year that Bates has been with Illinois State University. He is a native of southern California. He is amazed by the harsh winters, but is glad to be at Illinois State teaching young people who are excited about learning to be teachers. Originally, he studied organizational psychology and planned to work with adults in human resource training and development. Then, during his masters program, he had the opportunity to work with children in pre- and after-school programs. He had the opportunity to work with primarily Asian children at an academic day camp for K-6th graders. He was fascinated that children who could barely speak English could do the mathematics he taught. He then realized how interested he was in child development and specifically how influential the parents of these children were in their academic performance. So, he decided to pursue his Ph.D. in education with an emphasis in child and adolescent development.
Bates' research interests focus on parental influence on children's numerical cognition, how they understand numbers and counting. He is currently involved in a research project expanded from his doctoral dissertation at University of California, Santa Barbara. For his dissertation, he studied the differences in the assistance and support that mothers gave their three and four year olds and the impact that had on their understanding of mathematics, such as the concepts of "more" and "less." In his present research using the original framework and a Monopoly-like game that he created, he is focusing his attention on the Lebanese-community in Peoria, Illinois. Along with Laura Berk and Gregory Braswell from the psychology department, he will observe the interaction between mothers and fathers playing the game with their child, noting what explanations are given and how it impacts the child's understanding.
Along the same lines of focusing on interaction, he is beginning a study with Jin-ah Kim and Carol Owles at Jumpstart, a community service program at the University in which college students provide one-on-one educational intervention to preschoolers of low-income families. The study examines how interaction between children and key adults in their lives influences their understanding of reading.
The difference between these projects and most other projects is that these focus on actual observation of the interaction between adult and child. Most other research focuses on surveys—asking individuals what they do in various situations. However, seeing what is actually happening is much more enlightening. He hopes to expand his research to study fathers' interactions with their children in the Bloomington-Normal community.
Bates understands that development begins early for toddlers and preschool-aged children and that mathematics is an important part of that developmental process. Through these projects, Bates hopes to identify what behaviors and interactions are most beneficial to the children in learning mathematic concepts. Through this identification, he would like to develop common practices and guidelines for parents and caregivers and expand them for preschool teachers. "After all," he says, "for three- and four-year-olds, life is a game. It's a perfect time to teach. So make math fun!"
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