Letters and numbers are different domains, and their differentiation increases with schooling. It has nonetheless been argued that reading alphabetic and numerical materials partly involves the same processes, even in adults. Whether individuals with dyslexia have difficulty reading and writing numbers remains to be established. This study…

The paper presents some reflections and activities developed by researchers and teachers involved in teacher education programs on cultural transposition. The construct of cultural transposition is presented as a condition for decentralizing the didactic practice of a specific cultural context through contact with other didactic practices of…

In this paper, we provide an overall perspective on the teaching and learning of discrete mathematics. Our aim is to highlight what research has been conducted in this area and to connect it to existing research ideas for future work. We begin by characterizing discrete mathematics and its role in the school curriculum, highlighting themes,…

After some studies on students with Down syndrome (DS) who learned algebra and problem solving and few single case studies on analytic geometry, here the experience on analytic geometry was extended to 6 adolescents with DS, who attended mainstream schools. They were taught individually in the afternoon, one day per week, for 9 months by the same…

In this article, we explore Whitehead's claim that experience is fundamentally affective. We do so in the context of an Italian primary school classroom featuring the use of the multitouch application "TouchCounts." We study the way in which the children and the iPad take each other up and the meanings of number and arithmetic that…

Difficulties in mathematics have been described in very preterm children, but their origins are not well understood and may differ from other populations with specific learning disability. Very preterm children, children with learning disability, and typically developing children were compared in mathematics skills, using standardized tools,…

This article reconsiders Case's theory of central conceptual structures (CCS), examining the relation between working memory and the acquisition of quantitative CCS. The lead hypothesis is that the development of working memory capacity shapes the development of quantitative concepts (whole and rational numbers). Study I, with 779 children from…

In two experiments, participants judged the average numerosity between two sequentially presented dot patterns to perform an approximate arithmetic task. In Experiment 1, the response was given on a 0-20 numerical scale (categorical scaling), and in Experiment 2, the response was given by the production of a dot pattern of the desired numerosity…

Humans and other animals are able to make rough estimations of quantities using what has been termed the "approximate number system" (ANS). Much evidence suggests that sensitivity to numerosity correlates with symbolic math capacity, leading to the suggestion that the ANS may serve as a start-up tool to develop symbolic math. Many…

This work aims to evaluate the relationship between early numerical competence in kindergarteners and their numerical representations as measured by the number line task (NLT). Thirty-four 5-year-old children participated in the study. Children's early performance on symbolic and non-symbolic numerical tasks was considered to determine which was a…

The unit-decade compatibility effect is interpreted to reflect processes of place value integration in two-digit number magnitude comparisons. The current study aimed at elucidating the influence of language properties on the compatibility effect of Arabic two-digit numbers in Austrian, Italian, and Czech first graders. The number word systems of…

The current study aimed at exploring the impact of the modality in which numerical trainings proposed in kindergarten school. Participants were recruited from some Sardinian kindergarten schools and were then divided into three groups: a control group, which had to carry out the activities planned by the educational curriculum, and two…

In the number-to-position task, with increasing age and numerical expertise, children's pattern of estimates shifts from a biased (nonlinear) to a formal (linear) mapping. This widely replicated finding concerns symbolic numbers, whereas less is known about other types of quantity estimation. In Experiment 1, Preschool, Grade 1, and Grade 3…

The development of numerical abilities was examined in three groups of 5 year-olds: one including 13 children accomplishing a numerical training in pencil-and-paper format (EG1); another group including 21 children accomplished a homologous training in computerized format; the remaining 24 children were assigned to the control group (CG). The…

In the number to position task, several studies have shown that typically developing children shift from a biased (logarithmic) to an accurate (linear) mapping of symbolic digits onto a spatial position on a line. The initial pattern of overestimation of small numbers and the underestimation of larger numbers is compensated by means of age and…