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…

Children and adults often have difficulties comparing decimal magnitudes. Although individuals attempt to reconcile decimals with prior whole-number and fraction knowledge, conceptual and procedural differences between decimals and prior knowledge of whole numbers and fractions can lead to incorrect strategies. The dynamic strategy choice account…

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…

Wynn's (1992) seminal research reported that infants looked longer at stimuli representing "incorrect" versus "correct" solutions of basic addition and subtraction problems and concluded that infants have innate arithmetical abilities. Since then, infancy researchers have attempted to replicate this effect, yielding mixed…

The longitudinal relations of domain-general and numerical skills at ages 6-7 years to 3 cognitive domains of arithmetic learning, namely knowing (written computation), applying (arithmetic word problems), and reasoning (arithmetic reasoning) at age 11, were examined for a representative sample of 378 Finnish children. The results showed that…

The present study tested the hypothesis that children's fluency with basic number facts and knowledge of computational strategies, derived from early arithmetic experience, predicts their performance on complex arithmetic problems. First-grade students from United States and Taiwan (N = 152, mean age: 7.3 years) were presented with problems that…

Are there differential benefits of training sequential number knowledge versus spatial skills for children's numerical and spatial performance? Three- to five-year-old children (N = 84) participated in 1 session of either sequential training (e.g., what comes before and after the number 5?) or non-numerical spatial training (i.e., decomposition of…

It has been suggested that working memory training programs are effective both as treatments for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other cognitive disorders in children and as a tool to improve cognitive ability and scholastic attainment in typically developing children and adults. However, effects across studies appear to be…