Promoting preschoolers' numerical knowledge through spatial analogies: Numbers’ spatial alignment influences its learning

Abstract

The development of early numerical representations is a complex cognitive process whereby children acquire numerical competences. To establish whether analogy making plays a role in this process of learning, we devised a classroom game based on an analysis of a number-line analogy that leverages children' spatial intuitions for helping them understand the numbers. To investigate the role of spatial positioning along the number line, seventy-seven preschoolers were randomly assigned to control tasks (control condition) or to embodied number line tasks in two possible spatial locations: watching numbers increasing either from left to right (space-number alignment condition) or from right to left (space-number misalignment condition). Performing learning activities for roughly two hours promoted children's proficiency in four tasks of numerical knowledge, but only children under spatial and numerical alignment increased their proficiency in a task of number line estimation. This finding shows that the numerical representations generated by children during training were integrated with spatial information that was implicit in the learning activities, thus revealing that analogical alignments play a key role in the formation of early numerical representations. Additionally, this study illustrates that interrogating the analogy at the foundation of an instructional activity highlights key instructional decisions that can have a large impact on learning. Future research along this line might provide a framework for using analogy at the foundations of instructional design.