Preschool Children's Use of Counting to Compare Two Sets in Cardinal Situations

Abstract

Two experiments exploring the effect of intervention and test conditions on preschoolers' use of counting to compare two sets. The intervention did not have an effect on younger children's (mean: 3:9) use of counting. At the mean age of 4:4, the children were more likely to use counting to compare sets in the two intervention groups than were the children in the Control group. Children in the Natural test condition were more likely to use counting than were the children in the Traditional test condition. Many 4-year-olds were reluctant to use counting if no intervention prompted it, because (1) they did not know that counting was a better strategy than visual comparison, or because (2) preschool children's use of counting to compare sets was easily affected by contextual factors in a test condition. Preschool children's use of counting to compare sets was closely related to their counting performance.