An Exploratory Look at the Relationships Among Math Skills, Motivational Factors and Activity Choice

Conceptual correlates of counting: Children’s spontaneous matching and tracking of large sets reflects their knowledge of the cardinal principle

“…Children who intuitively pay more attention to numerosity in SFON tasks might enter more quickly into skillful counting or might be more motivated to practice counting (Hannula, Räsänen, & Lehtinen, 2007). Individual differences in SFON are consistently related to children's counting skills such as subitizing in the small number range and rote counting in the large number range (Batchelor, Inglis, & Gilmore, 2015;Edens & Potter, 2013;Hannula & Lehtinen, 2005;Hannula et al, 2007); furthermore, SFON in 3.5-year-old children is related to higher subsequent mathematical knowledge at ages 5 and 12 (Hannula & Lehtinen, 2005;Hannula-Sormunen, Lehtinen, & Räsänen, 2015). However, the current study differs from previous SFON studies in several important ways.…”

“…In the present research, we developed two non-verbal numerical tasks, inspired by Hannula and colleagues' research on 'spontaneously focusing on numerosity' or SFON (e.g., Edens & Potter, 2013;Hannula & Lehtinen, 2005;McMullen, Hannula-Sormunen, & Lehtinen, 2013see Rathé et al, 2016, for a recent review). SFON is defined by Hannula and Lehtinen (2005) as a child's self-generated tendency to pay attention to and engage with quantities and number without prompting or any explicit cues in the environment.…”

Spontaneous Focusing on Quantitative Relations in the Development of Children's Fraction Knowledge

“…SFON tendency not only describes children's activities in laboratory tasks, but observation studies show that SFON tendency is also an indicator of children's spontaneous self-initiated practice of their early numerical skills in their everyday surroundings (Hannula, Mattinen, & Lehtinen, 2005). Studies show that SFON tendency (a) is a domain-specific predictor of mathematical achievement Hannula, Lepola, Lehtinen, 2010), (b) can be enhanced through social interaction (Hannula, Mattinen, & Lehtinen, 2005), and (c) is a crossculturally relevant concept for describing the development of early mathematical skills (Edens & Potter, 2013;Kucian et al, 2012). These results suggest that research into children's spontaneous quantitative focusing tendencies fills a crucial gap in research on children's mathematical competencies.…”

Assessing Numeracy in the Upper Elementary and Middle School Years

“…A review of the published empirical literature on students' learning orientation specifically, or academic motivational goals more broadly, in the mathematics domain reveals complex and varied associations with positive relationships more likely to be found with younger samples than older samples. For example, researchers have found a positive relationship between teachers' ratings of preschoolers' motivation and their counting and spatial skills (Edens and Potter 2013). Among upper elementary students, those who are challenge seekers and have a learning-goal orientation are more likely to have higher self-efficacy in math (Meyer et al 1997).…”