Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to discuss young children’s approaches to dealing with combinatorial tasks and to present some teachers’ strategies to support children’s combinatorial reasoning. The discussions are based on clinical interviews with young children (ages 6–8) who were asked to solve a combinatorial task centered on the process of combinatorial counting. Children were interviewed in a private setting and were given some manipulative to help them visualize, explore, model, and solve the combinatorial task. The results revealed by the clinical interviews were contrasted with those disclosed by the literature on children’s combinatorial development. Such a contrast suggests that some strategies could be used to support children’s combinatorial reasoning. One of the important contributions of this chapter is that it reveals the close relation between young children’s combinatorial reasoning and multiplicative reasoning. Consequently, teachers’ strategies to support young children’s combinatorial reasoning need to be grounded on the development of multiplicative reasoning and to support exploration of combinatorial counting processes. The chapter closes by presenting and discussing some strategies for teachers to support young children in their combinatorial reasoning.
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Notes
- 1.
Additive reasoning is related to children’s first organized attempt to understand and operate with adults’ number system and it is mainly based on addition and subtraction while multiplicative reasoning recognizes and uses grouping to manage the number system.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by Universidad de Antioquia Research Committee—CODI and Colciencias, Grant Number CT 438-2017.
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Zapata-Cardona, L. (2018). Supporting Young Children to Develop Combinatorial Reasoning. In: Leavy, A., Meletiou-Mavrotheris, M., Paparistodemou, E. (eds) Statistics in Early Childhood and Primary Education. Early Mathematics Learning and Development. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1044-7_15
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