Abstract:

Geometric shapes are one of the primary subjects in mathematics education during early childhood Even before entering formal schooling children will have some basic information about geometric shapes through their everyday experiences Some of this early information about geometric shapes might be erroneous which might negatively impact children’s further understanding of geometric shapes For that reason exploring how children recognize and classify geometric shapes and the criteria they use for classification is critical in determining the content of early mathematics education Van Hiele’s theory about the development of geometrical thinking is regarded as one of the basis theories concerning children’s classification of geometric shapes However recently there seems to be some arguments put forward claiming that van Hiele’s theory is insufficient in explaining development of geometric thinking in early childhood Thus this study was conducted to determine 3 to 6 year old preschoolers’ and primary 1st grade and 4th grade students’ recognition levels of geometric shapes and the criteria they use to distinguish one group of shape from the other To this end individual interviews were conducted with 150 children Four classification tasks triangle rectangle square and circle were used in this study as data collection tool The data collection tool used in this study was developed by the researchers based on the previous studies Each classification task consisted of classifying 12 shapes which were outlined on an A4 size paper Results of the study revealed that while young children were successful in recognizing typical examples of the geometric shapes they were not successful enough in recognizing the atypical examples such as shapes with different size orientation aspect ratio skewness It was also determined that younger children were paying attention mostly to visual attributes of the shapes in the process of classification In contrast older children were found to pay attention both to visual and property attributes or only to property attributes Thus results of the present study hand support to recent criticism of van Hiele’s theory Key Words: Early childhood mathematics geometry classification of geometric shapes

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