Abstract
The work presented here compares two groups of three- and four-year-old children who differ in their school entrance age and consequently in the social expectations of what they should know at these particular ages. The comparison was made in order to assess the effect of children’s counting ability on their ability to reason about number. An experiment was designed to make sure that children who succeeded were basing their answers only on the operation performed. The experiment included a set size with more items in it than any of the children would supposedly be able to count. Also, some of the tasks combined addition and subtraction with lengthening and shortening and homogeneous sets were used to avoid the possibility of an answer being based on the presence or absence of a specific item. Three possible outcomes were predicted and the results obtained were analysed in the light of these. The results support the conclusion that young children may reason about number even without having represented it and that children’s counting ability does not necessarily underlie their capacity to identify number-relevant operations but rather that the ability to make number-based judgements develops independently from the knowledge of counting.
Résumé
Le travail présenté ici a permis de comparer deux groupes d’enfants de 3 et 4 ans, ayant commencé leur scolarité à des âges différents et qui, par conséquent différent aussi par les attentes sociales concernant leurs connaissances. La comparaison a été faite de façon à estimer, chez les enfants, l’influence de la capacité de compter sur leur capacité de raisonner sur les nombres. Une expérience a été réalisée pour s’assurer que les réussites des enfants sont uniquement dues à l’opération réalisée. Dans cette expérience un des ensembles à dénombrer comportait un nombre d’élément excédant les capacités de dénombrement des enfants de cet âge. En outre, les tâches utilisées combinaient addition et soustraction avec augmentation et diminution et, pour éviter que la réponse repose sur la présence ou l’absence de certains éléments, on a utilisé des ensembles homogènes; Les résultats obtenus ont été analysées fonction de trois hypothèses initiales. On peut conclure que de petits enfants peuvent raisonner sur nombre même s’ils ne savent pas représenter. Leur capacité de comptage n’est pas forcément à l’origine de leur capacité d’identifier des opérations numériques applicables; la capacité de produire des jugements sur le nombre se développe indépendamment de la connaissance du processus de comptage.
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Bertelli, R., Joanni, E. & Martlew, M. Relationship between children’s counting ability and their ability to reason about number. Eur J Psychol Educ 13, 371–383 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172951
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172951