ABSTRACT

Capturing the breadth and variety of children’s understanding is critical if studies of children’s mathematical thinking are to inform policy and practice in early childhood education. This article presents an investigation of young children’s counting. Detailed coding and analyses of assessment interviews with 476 preschoolers revealed understandings that would be overlooked by solely assessing the accuracy of their responses. In particular, many children demonstrated understandings of counting principles on a challenging task that were not captured by other, simpler tasks. We conclude that common approaches to capturing young children’s mathematical understanding are likely underestimating their capabilities. This study contributes to researchers’ understanding of what making sense of counting looks and sounds like for preschool age children (3–5 years), the development and relations among counting principles (one-to-one, cardinal, and patterns of the number sequence), and the affordances of challenging, open-ended tasks. We close by considering the implications of recognizing and building from what children know and can do for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

摘要

如果要对儿童的数学思维进行研究，以便为幼儿教育中的政策和实践提供信息，那么获取儿童的理解的广度和多样性至关重要。本文介绍了对幼儿计数的调查。对476名学龄前儿童进行的评估访谈的详细编码和分析表明，仅通过评估其回答的准确性就可以忽略这些理解。尤其是，许多孩子表现出了对具有挑战性的任务的计数原理的理解，而其他简单的任务则无法捕捉到。我们得出结论，捕获幼儿数学理解的通用方法可能会低估他们的能力。这项研究有助于研究人员了解对学龄前儿童（3-5岁）的外观和声音进行计数的意义，计数原理（一对一，基数和数字顺序模式）的发展和关系。 ），以及具有挑战性的开放性任务。最后，我们将考虑从儿童所知道并能为研究人员，从业人员和政策制定者认知和建立的意义。