The same and different routine offers an opportunity to build a strong foundation for future grades while also deepening the experiences of prekindergarten and transitional kindergarten students. Students have opportunities to make sense, share ideas, and engage in the ideas of others. We conjecture this type of experience supports students and…

Preschool students' mastery of early numeracy skills is important, so they enter kindergarten with the necessary prerequisite skills, which are predictive of achievement in later elementary grades. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) instructional package on the foundational early…

In two studies, we investigated whether using three-dimensional (3D) manipulatives during assessment aided performance on a variety of preschool mathematics tasks compared to pictorial representations. On measures of children's understanding of counting and cardinality (n = 103), there was no difference in performance between manipulatives and…

The results of this study revealed students' solution strategies progressed from inefficient strategies e.g., counting on fingers to more efficient strategies with mathematical connections. These findings should enable educators to gain more insight to use Number Talks to help student develop computational fluency with numbers.

Despite the increasing integration of technology in early childhood education, empirical research on the effectiveness of Web 2.0-based numeracy learning remains limited, particularly in developing countries. This study investigates the impact of a Web 2.0-based Numeracy Education Program on first-grade students' numeracy skills using a…

In this article, the authors share how gameplay with dominoes can leverage students' quantitative reasoning to promote number development and additive reasoning. This article explores three domino games (Basic Dominoes, Just Before/Just After, and Ten Train), and considers the following: (1) rules and details; (2) students' subitizing and unit…

Research Findings: In this research, 487 Chinese children age 3 to 5 years took part in a number line estimation task. This task was used to assess children's estimation accuracy and their estimation patterns along a number line in two different estimation circumstances. Situation A had the same line lengths for different numeric ranges, whereas…

In the USA, the Common Core Standards in Mathematics for the early grades (K-3) are designed to build on and develop students' number sense as students gain understanding of the structures of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It is well understood in teaching circles that subtraction is notoriously more difficult for students…

Although the complexity of children's number learning is recognized, trade books about number have been treated as a simple, undifferentiated set. This analysis of 186 children's books, however, categorized a distinct subset of books about number as "counting books." These counting books were complex with regard to portrayal of counting…

The "cardinality principle" (CP) is a conceptual basis of counting collections meaningfully and provides a foundation for understanding other key aspects of numeracy, such as the successor principle or counting-on to determine sums. Unfortunately, little research has focused on how best to teach the CP. One suggestion is that modeling…

The relation between mathematical achievement in early childhood and future academic success is well established. However, the effect of instruction on mathematical performance is less well-documented and often reliant upon self-report instruction measures and standardized achievement measures. Therefore, this study seeks to use observational data…

One of the biggest challenges for primary school children is moving beyond the use of counting in calculation. The purpose of this study was to investigate how Zambian Grade 1 to Grade 4 children at primary school see a group of 10 as an effective pattern and structure with the given concrete material. The study consisted of three phases…

This study used hierarchical linear modeling to examine the relationship between an internet-based mathematics formative assessment and data from a mathematics summative assessment for primary grade learners (ages 5-7). Results showed a positive relationship between formative assessment data related to the concepts of counting and decomposing…

Research Findings: This study evaluated the effects of an early mathematics intervention designed to engage preschool children, their teachers, and their families in an interactive mathematics game. Previous research shows that playing this specific type of linear board game results in increased numerical skills and understanding in young children…

The three target articles presented in this special issue converged on an emerging theme: the importance of spatial proportional reasoning. They suggest that the ability to map between symbolic fractions (like 1/5) and nonsymbolic, spatial representations of their sizes or "magnitudes" may be especially important for building robust…