Early arithmetic skills, and in particular the understanding of the part-whole relationship, are currently considered crucial for future arithmetic achievement. They are complex skills extending far beyond the mastery of counting procedures. In order to develop these arithmetic skills in kindergarten children, we developed a game-based approach…

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…

Several factors seem important to understand the nature of mathematical learning. Byrnes and Miller combined these factors into the Opportunity-Propensity model. In this study the model was used to predict the number-processing factor and the arithmetic fluency in grade 4 (n = 195) and grade 5 (n = 213). Gender, intelligence and affect (positive…

Both mathematics anxiety and metacognitive monitoring have been identified as associated with or predictive of individual differences in arithmetic achievement in primary school children. Although there are various theoretical reasons for an association between mathematics anxiety and metacognitive monitoring, it is unclear at the empirical level…

Numerous studies have tried to identify the core deficit of developmental dyscalculia (DD), mainly by assessing a possible deficit of the mental representation of numerical magnitude. Research in healthy adults has shown that numerosity, duration, and space share a partly common system of magnitude processing and representation. However, in DD,…

Many studies in the past decades have focused on low and typical mathematics achievers, yet little is known about children with high mathematics achievement, particularly at a young age. The current study aimed to fill this gap and started from the early work of Krutetskii (1976) as a theoretical lens to study the characteristics of high…

This study investigated the effect of children's first formal school years on mathematical skill profiles, measured by a variety of arithmetical skills and Spontaneous Focusing On Numerosity (SFON) tasks. By using person-centered approach the aim was to investigate whether the amount of formal schooling is associated with mathematical skills in…

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…

Studies comparing mathematical abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children are hitherto scarce, inconclusive, and mainly focusing on elementary school children or adolescents. The present study wants to gain insight into the foundation of mathematics by looking at preschool performances. Five early…

In this study it is investigated to what extent contextualized and non-contextualized mathematics test items have a differential impact on examinee effort. Mixture item response theory (IRT) models are applied to two subsets of items from a national assessment on mathematics in the second grade of the pre-vocational track in secondary education in…

The present study addresses the impact of the curriculum on primary school children's acquisition of clock-reading knowledge from analog and digital clocks. Focusing on Chinese and Flemish children's clock-reading knowledge, the study is about whether the differences in sequencing of learning and instruction opportunities--as defined by the…

Research Findings: To date, studies comparing the mathematical abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children are scarce, and results remain inconclusive. In general, studies on this topic focus on mathematical abilities learned from elementary school onward, with little attention for possible…

The present paper investigates differences in the process of mastering the four basic arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) between Flemish and Chinese children from Grade 3 till Grade 6 (i.e. from 8 to 11 years old). The results showed, firstly, that Chinese students outperformed Flemish students in each grade…

Numerical understanding and arithmetic skills are easier to acquire for whole numbers than fractions. The "integrated theory of numerical development" posits that, in addition to these differences, whole numbers and fractions also have important commonalities. In both, students need to learn how to interpret number symbols in terms of…

Against the background of neuroimaging studies on how the brain processes numbers, there is now converging evidence that numerical magnitude representations are crucial for successful mathematics achievement. One major drawback of this research is that it mainly investigated mathematics performance as measured through general standardized…