Finger gnosia and fine motor skills (FMS) are assumed to play a key role in the development of arithmetic abilities, but their contribution to early numerical skills (i.e., enumeration skills and cardinality) has received little attention so far. The purpose of this study was to investigate the predictive value of finger gnosia and FMS to…

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…

The relation to operands (RO) principles describe the relation between operands and answers in arithmetic problems (e.g., the sum is always larger than its positive addends). Despite being a fundamental property of arithmetic, its empirical relation with arithmetic/algebraic problem solving has seldom been investigated. The current longitudinal…

Young children have informal knowledge of fractions before learning about fraction symbols in school. In the current study, we followed 103 children in the Mid-Atlantic United States from the fall to the spring of first grade to characterize the development of individual differences in early informal fraction knowledge, as well as its relation to…

The aim of the present study was to examine the kinds of developmental profiles of arithmetic fluency skills that can be identified across Grades 1-9 (ages 7-16) in a large Finnish sample (n = 2,518). The study also examined whether membership in the developmental profiles could be predicted using a comprehensive set of kindergarten-age factors,…

Understanding fraction magnitudes is foundational for later math achievement. To represent a fraction x/y, children are often taught to use "partitioning": Break the whole into y parts and shade in x parts. Past research has shown that partitioning on number lines supports children's fraction magnitude knowledge more than partitioning on…

We examined the development of numerical magnitude representations of fractions and decimals from fourth to 12th grade. In Experiment 1, we assessed the rational number magnitude knowledge of 200 Chinese fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and 12th graders (92 girls and 108 boys) by presenting fraction and decimal magnitude comparison tasks as well as…

In the present research, we provide empirical evidence for the process of symbolic integration of number associations, focusing on the development of simple addition (e.g., 5 + 3 = 8), subtraction (e.g., 5 - 3 = 2), and multiplication (e.g., 5 × 3 = 15). Canadian children were assessed twice, in Grade 2 and Grade 3 (N = 244; 55% girls). All…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…