“Asking questions is the key”: Chinese kindergarten teachers support children’s mathematics concept learning and spatial reasoning through a Conceptual PlayWorld approach

Research underscores the importance of teachers’ questioning strategies for facilitating interactions that support children’s mathematics learning. Yet further investigation is essential to understand how these strategies specifically foster children’s exploration and conceptual understanding of mathematics within a play-based context. This study demonstrates how teachers utilise questioning strategies to facilitate children’s mathematics concept learning and spatial reasoning skills within the context of an imagined PlayWorld. Grounded in cultural-historical theory, a 5-month educational experiment was conducted with two kindergarten teachers and a class of 33 children aged 5–6 years in an urban Chinese kindergarten setting. The researchers and teachers collectively planned and implemented a pedagogical intervention, Fleer’s Conceptual PlayWorld approach, within the educational experiment to solve theoretical problems that support children’s mathematics concept learning in play. Multiple data sources were collected, including video observation, interviews, focus group discussions with teachers, documentation (i.e., lesson plans and reflections), and field notes. A dialectical-interactive approach was applied to interpret and analyse the interactions between the teachers and the children. Findings suggest that teachers’ questioning strategies in the Conceptual PlayWorld create the conditions for supporting children’s different embodied perspectives, noticing and responding to children’s spatial thinking and motivating children to solve spatial-mathematical problems collaboratively. This study also contributes to understanding how teachers’ dramatised and responsive mathematics questions promote the progression of play that aligns with children’s play intentions, thereby facilitating their mathematics concept learning and spatial reasoning. This study offers valuable implications for both research and practice in early childhood mathematics education.