Chapter 21 - Improving Low-Income Children’s Number Sense

Abstract

This chapter describes how a theoretical analysis and empirical findings regarding number sense led to the development of an educational intervention that produces large and rapid increases in low-income children's mathematical knowledge. Absolute differences in mathematical knowledge between children from richer and poorer backgrounds, already substantial in kindergarten, steadily widen over the course of schooling. One result of the minimal mathematical input they receive is that children from low-income families often enter school with poorly developed number sense. There is widespread agreement that acquiring number sense is an important part of mathematical development and an important goal of mathematics instruction. The nonverbal representations of quantity appear to be largely spatial, though other sensory modalities also seem to be included in the representation. Both behavioral and neural data support the mental number line construct. Given that children can count from 1 to 10 at least a year before they show knowledge of the magnitudes of knowledge in this range, counting is clearly insufficient for generating accurate numerical magnitude representations.