Abstract
Children’s early numerical capacities form the building blocks for later arithmetic proficiency. Linear number placements and counting skills are indicative of mapping, as an important precursor to arithmetic skills, and have been suggested to be of vital importance to arithmetic development. The current study investigated whether fostering mapping skills is more efficient through a counting or a number line training program. Effects of both programs were compared through a quasi-experimental design, and moderation effects of age and socio-economic status (SES) were investigated. Ninety kindergartners were divided into three conditions: a counting, a number line, and a control condition. Pretests and posttests included an arithmetic (addition) task and a battery of number sense tasks (comparison, number lines, and counting). Results showed significantly greater gains in arithmetic, counting, and symbolic number lines in the counting training group than in the control group. The number line training group did not make significantly greater gains than the control group. Training gains were moderated by age, but not SES. We concluded that counting training improved numerical capacities effectively, whereas no such improvements could be found for the number line training. This suggests that only a counting approach is effective for fostering number sense and early arithmetic skills in kindergarten. Future research should elaborate on the parameters of training programs and the consequences of variation in these parameters.
Highlights
Children’s early numerical capacities have received growing interest in the past decade: numerical skills in kindergarten form the building blocks for later proficiency in mathematics (e.g., Passolunghi and Lanfranchi, 2012; Hornung et al, 2014)
Counting and Number Line Training map between symbolic and non-symbolic magnitudes (Dehaene, 2001; Mundy and Gilmore, 2009; Desoete et al, 2012; Kolkman et al, 2013). This mapping ability is trained in typically performing kindergartners using two different training programs, in order to investigate how the skill is best fostered and how arithmetic skills can be fostered through mapping
Mapping is considered to lie at the root of adequate development of arithmetic skills (Siegler and Booth, 2004; Booth and Siegler, 2008; Wong et al, 2016) and refers to a flexible integration between non-symbolic and symbolic quantity processing, meaning that children with well-developed mapping skills are able to transcode between number words, number symbols, and non-symbolic quantities
Summary
Children’s early numerical capacities have received growing interest in the past decade: numerical skills in kindergarten form the building blocks for later proficiency in mathematics (e.g., Passolunghi and Lanfranchi, 2012; Hornung et al, 2014). It was suggested that mapping, as the most important factor of number sense, develops through counting skills, as described by Le Corre and Carey (2007), who postulated that children make analogies between the sequence in the count list and quantifiable sets of objects, and use induction to learn to understand the correspondence between the addition of an item to a set and the progression through the count list This implies that the mapping between number words and tangible quantities is first understood by a child through the bottom-up process of counting, making counting a first step toward a more abstract concept of number. Because age has been found to explain differences in intervention outcomes between studies (Kroesbergen and Van Luit, 2003), the age of the children was included as a moderator variable
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