Professional Competence of Early Childhood Educators in Mathematics Education-A Theory Based Competence Model

Early childhood mathematics education became a more significant part of mathematics education over the past years. To guarantee coherent mathematical learning in pre-school settings, pre- and inservice education of early childhood educators in mathematics education is getting more and more important. Therefore, a sound examination and an intensive discussion of professional competence of early childhood educators are necessary. So far there are several theoretical and empirical findings considering teacher competence-in mathematics education as well as from an interdisciplinary perspective. But research of childhood educators' domain-specific competencies is a quite young field of research. In order to investigate this field it can be drawn on results of research of teacher competence and of pre-school education as well as on initial empirical findings of different facets of competence of early childhood educators. Based on these results and on a theoretical analysis of the requirements of early childhood educators concerning early mathematics education, this article suggests a theory-based domain-specific model of early childhood educators' competencies for mathematics education. This model aims to inspire a discussion about necessary competencies of early childhood educators-especially in comparison to competencies of teachers, which are seen as important for their profession-and can serve to develop instruments for the investigation of these professional competencies. In further studies this model has to be analysed empirically.