A 3-year longitudinal study of children's comprehension of counting: Do they recognize the optional nature of nonessential counting features?

Detection of counting pseudoerrors: What helps children accept them?

“…() and Escudero et al . (), however, pseudoerrors with and without cardinal values differed, and existing data suggest that some pseudoerrors are more easily accepted by children than others. In the current study, we analyse whether the degree of difficulty of the pseudoerrors also depends on the nature of the conventional rules that are violated.…”

“…Data suggest that the acquisition of logical and conventional rules appears to follow independent processes and different developmental trajectories. It is assumed that the comprehension of logical rules improves with age (see, e.g., Freeman, Antonucci, & Lewis, ; Le Corre, ; Sarnecka & Carey, ; Wynn, for a detailed analysis of children's early comprehension of cardinality); however, results from cross‐sectional and longitudinal studies have found distinct developmental patterns for the understanding of conventional rules (e.g., Briars & Siegler, ; Escudero, Rodríguez, Lago, & Enesco, ; LeFevre et al ., ; Rodríguez et al ., ).…”

“…Difficulty with pseudoerrors among children has attracted considerable research interest, and previous studies have shown that (1) children perform better with errors than pseudoerrors throughout the primary grades (Geary, Hamson, & Hoard, ; LeFevre et al ., ; Saxe, Becker, Sadeghpour, & Sicilian, ); (2) children are not sensitive to set size while making pseudoerror judgments (Kamawar et al ., ; LeFevre et al ., ); (3) gender does not affect the overall data pattern (LeFevre et al ., ); (4) preschoolers and first graders score significantly higher when presented with correct identification coding criteria (right/wrong answers) than when presented with correct identification–justification coding criteria (i.e., when the coding was also based on correct justification) (Escudero et al ., ); and (5) the patterns of performance seem to vary with overall mathematical skill: The most skilled children increase their success levels as they progress through grade levels, whereas the performance of less skilled children worsens over time (LeFevre et al ., ).…”

“…Another factor that has attracted the attention of researchers, either implicitly (LeFevre et al ., ) or explicitly (Escudero et al ., ; Rodríguez et al ., ), is the importance of the cardinal value in helping children realize that unconventional procedures also generate correct answers. The former authors proposed that children may become confused when presented with unconventional counts and that this may prevent children from establishing whether a puppet had counted correctly.…”

“…() and Escudero et al . () reported differences in child performance when pseudoerrors with and without cardinal values were presented. Specifically, the authors found that the presence of an explicit cardinal value improved the children's performance because it minimized the importance of the procedure that determined the cardinality of a given set as well as the power of conventional rules.…”