Early Understanding of Number

Abstract

We see, hear, and use numbers to communicate with other people on a daily basis. What are the origins of the human capacity for representing number? How does this capacity for number representation develop? To shed light on these questions, this entry reviews three types of evidence, from infancy till age 5: infants' abilities to process nonsymbolic quantities; children's protracted learning of the first few number word meanings; and how children may acquire a representation of number through learning the cultural practice of counting. Together, these studies reveal that children have a rich quantitative understanding even prior to formal schooling.

The development of early arithmetic skills: What, when, and how?

“…Average accuracy on counting-related questions was 73.8% (SD = 19.4%). The violin plot in Figure1also suggests that a majority of children performed well on counting-related questions, suggesting that at the average age of 4 years 9 months, most Singaporean children have learned how to count and use counting to identify the numerosity of collections, consistent with findings of previous studies from other countries (seeCheung & Ansari, 2020, for a review). Specifically, children understand the last word of a count refers to the total quantity of a collection of objects, and can use it to generate…”

“…To learn counting, children learn to use a list of number words in a stable order (e.g., "one, two, three, four" and not "one, two, three, five") and assigning one number word to each object (Frye, Braisby, Lowe, Maroudas, & Nicholls, 1989;Fuson, 1988;Gelman & Gallistel, 1978). In addition to these procedural rules, numerous studies have shown that children learn how to use counting to generate sets of objects at around ages 3 to 4 (for a review, see Cheung & Ansari, 2020). That is, they understand that the last word of a counted set represents the total number of objects in the set, and this is termed the cardinal principle ( Le Corre, Van de Walle, Brannon, & Carey, 2006;Sarnecka & Carey, 2008;Wynn, 1990Wynn, , 1992.…”

“…It includes clear learning objectives, key components on children's numerical thinking, and ideas for activities that teachers can engage with their students. For example, one of the aspects NEL identifies in numeracy is counting and understanding the relations between numbers, which is a key component documented in the developmental literature (Cheung & Ansari, 2020;Nunes & Bryant, 2007). NEL encourages teachers to provide opportunities for children to "count, compare, combine, and take apart numbers… learning experiences must be authentic and relevant to children during play or as they occur in the real world" (p. 8, Vol 6., MOE 2013).…”