Abstract
The present study assessed Finnish kindergarten (N = 177, Mage = 76.4 months, SD = 3.7 months) and grade one (N = 178, Mage = 87.2 months, SD = 3.7 months) children’s mathematical skills in the beginning of the school year. The mathematical skills were assessed once using researcher-developed paper-pencil tests. The variance analysis (ANOVA) was used to study the effects of age and gender on performance level. Boys and girls performed similarly in both samples, but age effects were found in the kindergarten and first grade; older children performed higher than younger ones. The older children may have had more opportunities to practise and get acquainted with mathematical issues, as the age difference between the youngest and the oldest child in the classroom can be up to one year. Children performing at or below the 25th percentile in both samples showed significantly weaker performance in several mathematical skills (i.e., number word sequences, enumeration, and addition and subtraction), compared to other performance groups. On the other hand, many children already understood in the beginning of the school year much of what is considered in mathematics curriculum and materials in their forthcoming school year in the kindergarten or the first grade.
Highlights
Children have large individual differences in their early mathematical skills (Aunio, Hautamäki, Sajaniemi, & Van Luit, 2009; Jordan, Kaplan, Ramineni, & Locuniak, 2009), and those children starting with weak skills seem to perform more poorly than their peers along the school years (Jordan, Kaplan, Locuniak, & Ramineni, 2007; Morgan, Farkas, & Wu, 2009)
Many children already understood in the beginning of the school year much of what is considered in mathematics curriculum and materials in their forthcoming school year in the kindergarten or the first grade
In the present study we were interested in how the performance of kindergarten and first grade children in mathematical skills varied, if gender or age would affect the performance, and which mathematical skills were especially difficult for low-performing children
Summary
Children have large individual differences in their early mathematical skills (Aunio, Hautamäki, Sajaniemi, & Van Luit, 2009; Jordan, Kaplan, Ramineni, & Locuniak, 2009), and those children starting with weak skills seem to perform more poorly than their peers along the school years (Jordan, Kaplan, Locuniak, & Ramineni, 2007; Morgan, Farkas, & Wu, 2009). Several sub-skills have been found to have predictive power for later math performance, such as counting (Aubrey et al, 2006; Krajewski & Schneider, 2009), basic arithmetic (Aunola, Leskinen, Lerkkanen, & Nurmi, 2004), number knowledge, nonverbal calculation, story problems and number combinations (Jordan et al, 2007), number line and magnitude comparison (LeFevre et al, 2006), number reading (Passolunghi, Vercelloni, & Schadee, 2007), and numeracy related logical abilities (e.g., seriation, classification) (Aunio & Niemivirta, 2010; Desoete, Stock, Schepense, Baeyens, & Roeyers, 2009) These longitudinal results suggest that kindergarten and first grade children should be able to understand basic mathematical relational concepts, have number sequence and enumeration skills, and should be able to solve basic addition and subtraction tasks (verbal and symbolic), and that these skills form an important base for later math learning
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