OER 05/22 JDMM

OER 05/22 JDMM

Mechanisms underlying numeral ordering skills in children

Project ID: OER 05/22 JDMM
Subject area: Mathematics
Principal Investigator: Dr David Munez
Email: david.munez@nie.edu.sg
About the project

Over the past two decades, heightened interest in understanding the development of early numeracy skills has resulted in an expanding research field that has contributed to developments in mathematics education practices for the preschool sector. Recent years have also witnessed an increase in research on how numeral ordering skills relate to children’s mathematics achievement (a quick search on ERIC-EBSCO yielded over 300 contributions during the last five years which is equivalent to the number of results from 2000 to 2015).

The ability to discriminate whether a string of Arabic numbers is in order has emerged as a stronger explanatory variable of later math achievement and plays a more relevant role as an early screener of mathematical learning disabilities than other basic numeracy skills such as the ability to discriminate between the magnitudes of two numbers. Nonetheless, it remains unknown whether numeral ordering skills reflect the ordinality of numbers and which core competency numeral ordering tasks measure.

In other words, are ordering skills substantially different from other early numeracy skills such as verbal count sequence knowledge and numerical magnitude comparison? Are numeral ordering skills numeral? Or are they part of a domain-general ordering capacity? Furthermore, we do not know whether numeral ordering skills are only relevant for school-age children or explain variance in younger children’s mathematics.

In the current study, we disentangle number, ordinality, and order to address these key questions. Findings may contribute to clarify whether numeral ordering skills constitute specific mechanisms that contribute to math outcomes in kindergartners. This has implications regarding the role of numeral order processing as a sensitive and specific predictor of math difficulties early in development and how preschool teachers can support the understanding of numeral ordinality.

Looking for    
  • Primary 4 students
  • Kindergarten 1 students
    What will be expected of you 
    • Two sessions of face-to-face interviews (1 session of about 30 minutes per year)
    • Researchers in the team with experience interacting with children will conduct one-to-one sessions with each child
    • Experiments-games-assessments
    Other notes
    • Data collection will be scheduled during or after-school sessions, depending on teachers’ preference and availability
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