Learning to Count: Structured Practice With Spatial Cues Supports the Development of Counting Sequence Knowledge in 3-Year-Old English-Speaking Children

Dunbar, Kristina; Ridha, Aala; Cankaya, Ozlem; Lira, Carolina Jiménez; LeFevre, Jo‐Anne

doi:10.1080/10409289.2016.1210458

Cited by 13 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…This possibility is consistent with the cognitive alignment framework (Laski & Siegler, 2014), which underscores the importance of aligning the features of materials to desired learning outcomes to enhance learning (Dunbar et al, 2017; Fyfe et al, 2015; Laski & Siegler, 2014; Schiffman & Laski, 2018). This theory has successfully predicted which numerical board games (Laski & Siegler, 2014), patterning activities (Fyfe et al, 2015), arithmetic activities (Schiffman & Laski, 2018), and games for extending the count sequence (Dunbar et al, 2017) would be most effective for improving children’s knowledge. In all of these studies, children showed better learning when target math concepts (e.g., base-10 number structure) were instantiated in the features of materials (e.g., a board game with numbers arranged in decades vs. a singular row).…”

Section: Ways To Increase Parent Math Talksupporting

confidence: 76%

Minor changes, big differences? Effects of manipulating play materials on parental math talk.

Lu¹,

Vasilyeva²,

Laski³

2023

Developmental Psychology

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Given the established role of parental talk in the growth of math knowledge in preschoolers, there has been an increasing focus on identifying ways to promote parental math talk at this stage of child development. The current study investigated how parental math talk is affected by features of play materials and contexts. The features were manipulated along two dimensions: homogeneity (whether the toys were unique or included identical sets) and boundedness (whether the number of toys was restricted). Parent-child dyads (n = 75, child's age: 4-6) from China were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: unique objects-unbounded range, homogeneous sets-unbounded range, and homogeneous sets-bounded range. In all conditions, dyads played games in two contexts that varied in the extent to which they were typically associated with math-party preparation and grocery shopping. As expected, more parental math talk was observed in the grocery shopping than in the party preparation context. Importantly, the manipulation of features within context also affected the amount and nature of parental math talk: homogeneity increased absolute magnitude talk, and boundedness increased relative magnitude talk. The results provide support for the cognitive alignment framework, underscoring the importance of aligning the features of materials with targeted concepts and demonstrating the possibility of impacting parental math talk through small manipulations of play materials. Public Significance StatementThe study suggests that small changes in the features of play materials, such as including sets of identical toys, may increase the quantity and quality of parental math talk in play interactions with preschoolers. It also shows that parental math talk is affected by the context of pretend play. These findings point to opportunities for increasing parental math talk without intensive training or explicit instructions.

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Section: Ways To Increase Parent Math Talksupporting

confidence: 76%

Minor changes, big differences? Effects of manipulating play materials on parental math talk.

Lu¹,

Vasilyeva²,

Laski³

2023

Developmental Psychology

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“…Their highest verbal count without any errors was used as the measure of performance. The reported test-retest reliability for this measure with 3- and 4-year-old Canadian children in prior research was r = 0.580 ( Dunbar et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 83%

Home Learning Environments of Children in Mexico in Relation to Socioeconomic Status

Susperreguy

Lira

et al. 2021

Front. Psychol.

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We explored the home learning environments of 173 Mexican preschool children (aged 3–6 years) in relation to their numeracy performance. Parents indicated the frequency of their formal home numeracy and literacy activities, and their academic expectations for children’s numeracy and literacy performance. Children completed measures of early numeracy skills. Mexican parent–child dyads from families with either high- or low-socioeconomic status (SES) participated. Low-SES parents (n = 99) reported higher numeracy expectations than high-SES parents (n = 74), but similar frequency of home numeracy activities. In contrast, high-SES parents reported higher frequency of literacy activities. Path analyses showed that operational (i.e., advanced) numeracy activities were positively related to children’s numeracy skills in the high- but not in the low-SES group. These findings improve the understanding of the role of the home environment in different contexts and provide some insights into the sources of the variable patterns of relations between home learning activities and children’s numeracy outcomes. They also suggest that SES is a critical factor to consider in research on children’s home numeracy experiences.

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“…Key features of the underlying mental representations must be instantiated in the physical materials for learning of that representation to occur. This approach has successfully predicted which numerical board games [11], patterning activities [60], and games for extending the count sequence [61] would be most effective.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Materials count: Linear-spatial materials improve young children’s addition strategies and accuracy, irregular arrays don’t

Schiffman

Laski

2018

PLoS ONE

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Children who use advanced arithmetic strategies, such as count-on and decomposition, are more accurate when solving arithmetic problems and are more likely to later have higher levels of math achievement. The present study tested the hypothesis that instruction using linear-spatial representations would activate children’s knowledge necessary for use of mental addition strategies and, thus, lead to greater accuracy on addition problems, than instruction using irregular representations of magnitude. As predicted, low-income kindergartners (n = 29) randomly assigned to practice sums up to 10 using materials that instantiated the linear-spatial features of a mental number line (i.e., discrete squares arranged in rows) demonstrated substantially more improvement in solving unpracticed addition problems than children who practiced with irregular materials (i.e., pictures of stars arranged in random arrays). This was particularly true for children with better initial numerical knowledge, which provided support for the idea that existing knowledge was activated. The use of count-on more than doubled from pretest to posttest among children in the linear-spatial condition and this mediated the difference in improvement between conditions. The importance of aligning instructional materials to relevant mental representations–consistent with the Cognitive Alignment Framework for instructional design—is discussed.

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Learning to Count: Structured Practice With Spatial Cues Supports the Development of Counting Sequence Knowledge in 3-Year-Old English-Speaking Children

Cited by 13 publications

References 35 publications

Minor changes, big differences? Effects of manipulating play materials on parental math talk.

Minor changes, big differences? Effects of manipulating play materials on parental math talk.

Home Learning Environments of Children in Mexico in Relation to Socioeconomic Status

Materials count: Linear-spatial materials improve young children’s addition strategies and accuracy, irregular arrays don’t

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