Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Young children acquire informal math ideas through everyday experiences. Research demonstrates that storybookscan link their informal notions to abstract concepts (Murphy, 1999). The integration of visual and written depictions of math-ematics, along with conversations arising from the story, can bolster children’s capacity to communicate and think mathemati-cally. Despite the growing literature supporting use of math storybooks, little is understood about how educators perceive andinterpret the embedded math content. Our study presents storybook pages to educators and asks questions to determine whetherthey are more likely to identify concepts in math (e.g., number) or non-math (e.g., vocabulary) domains. We also analyze theassociation between domain and the degree of abstraction in the language used to describe content in that domain. Preliminarydata suggest that educators ask questions about number concepts at higher levels than expected and character’s actions at lowerlevels than expected.