Development of some counting principles in preschool children

Samardžija, Tena. (2009). Development of some counting principles in preschool children. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Psychology. [mentor Vlahović-Štetić, Vesna].

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Abstract

The purpose of this research was to examine whether there are differences in preschool children’s counting performance with regard to age and development of 'how-to-count' principles, as well as whether there are differences in children’s performance in counting and error detection tasks. A total of 55 children, enrolled in a nursery school in Zagreb, participated in the study. Children were divided into three age groups: younger (age 4), medium (age 5) and older group (age 6). The procedure consisted of nine tasks, designed to test children’s understanding of 'how-to-count' principles (as proposed by Gelman & Meck, 1986): one-to-one correspondence (three tasks), stable order principle (three tasks) and cardinality principle (three tasks). All children were tested on all tasks, which included both counting tasks (procedural knowledge) and error detection tasks (conceptual knowledge). Younger children were significantly less successful than both the older and medium group, while the latter two groups were equally successful in counting. Furthermore, children were more successful on the one-to-one correspondence tasks than on the cardinality and stable order tasks, while there were no differences between the cardinality and stable order tasks. This could lead to conclusion that children acquire the one-to-one correspondence principle at an earlier stage than the cardinality and stable order principles. As regards the differences between children's performance in counting and error detection tasks, children were more successful on the error detection tasks than in counting on the stable order tasks, while on the one-to-one correspondence tasks, there were no differences in children's performance on the two types of tasks. The situation was different on the cardinality tasks, where they were more successful on the counting tasks than in error detection. Therefore, these findings did not entirely confirm the 'principles before skills' model.

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