©2023 Tamsin Meaney, Elin K. L. Reikerås and Camilla N. Justnes. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/). Citation: Meaney, T., Reikerås, E. K. L. and Justnes, C. N. (2023). Special issue on mathematics in early childhood education. Nordisk barnehageforskning, Special issue: Matematikk i barnehagen, 20(2), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.23865/nbf.v20.494 Editorial | Vol. 20, No. 2, 2023, pp. 1–4 | ISSN: 1890-9167 Special issue on mathematics in early childhood education Tamsin Meaney, Elin K. L. Reikerås* and Camilla N. Justnes Western Norway University of Applied Science, University of Stavanger and Norwegian University of technology and Science, Norway *Contact corresponding author: Elin K. L. Reikerås, e-mail: elin.reikeraas@uis.no Mathematics is an important part of children’s daily life. Te value of mathematics for young children is refected in curricula for early childhood in the Nordic countries and consequently, mathematics education courses are included in teacher education for early childhood. However, mathematics in early childhood education is understood in diferent ways, infuenced by both politics and research, and practitioners’ approach to the feld. As a feld of research, mathematics education for young children is fairly new in the Nordic countries. From the early 2000s, an increasing interest in this feld can be seen in a corre- sponding increase in the number of publications. Tis has also seen a dedicated bi-annual conference on mathematics education for young children being held in Scandinavia three times since its inception in 2012. Since the frst special issue on kindergarten mathematics was published in NOMAD Nordic Studies in Mathematics Education in 2016, the feld has continued to expand in a wide range of directions. Te articles in this special issue repre- sent a range of current research that shows some of the diferent directions and depth of research on mathematics in early childhood in Norway and Sweden. In some article the focus is on fnding out what children are able to do by themselves (Sumpter & Hedefalk; Saksvik-Raanes et al.; Fosse et al.) while in others it is on what children can do when teach- ers provide purposefully-designed activities (Björklund & Palmér). In other articles, the focus is to fnd out what happens in early childhood centres by interviewing teachers (Pollarolo et al.) or examining progression plans (Bøhler). In Vee’s article the focus was on