Office of Child Development and Early Learning (OCDEL) Research: Research Summaries

Study Objective:

To determine whether ANS precision measured prior to entering school predicts school mathematics during or after kindergarten

Implications for practice: If ANS skills influence mathematical ability, they may be important targets for early intervention or instruction and may even guide efforts to vary some aspects of mathematics instruction on the basis of students’ foundational skills. In addition, there is a growing body of evidence that individual differences in cognitive skills make a powerful contribution to children’s mathematical learning.

Ref type: journal

Authors: Michele M. M. Mazzocco, Lisa Feigenson, & Justin Halberda

Publication name: PLoS ONE

Publication date: 9/14/2011

Publication volume #: 6

Publication issue #: 9

Participants:

17 preschool children (7 girls, 10 boys)

Setting:

Design:

Intervention:

Outcomes:

mathematics skills, cognitive performance

Measures:

ANS numerical discrimination task given in preschool; Test of Early Mathematics Ability – Third Edition (TEMA-3), Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI), and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) given at 6 years of age

Analysis/Results:

ANS precision accounted for 28% of the variance in TEMA-3 scores, demonstrating an association between ANS precision prior to schooling and mathematics performance after the onset of formal instruction. While ANS precision was not a significant predictor on any of the WASI subtests (Vocabulary, Block Design, or Matrix Reasoning), ANS precision was a significant predictor of RAN Numbers response time.

Author's conclusions: ANS precision measured years prior to formal schooling predicts mathematical ability in elementary school. While ANS skills are predictive of future and current mathematics abilities, additional factors also contribute to mathematics achievement: motivational factors, teachers’ content knowledge and knowledge of pedagogy, teachers’ and students’ mathematics anxiety, student-teacher relationships, curriculum and instruction, and domain-general cognitive skills including but not limited to working memory and processing speed.

Notes:

The Approximate Number System (ANS) is a mental system of magnitude representations that produces an intuitive “number sense” across species and throughout human development, starting from just after birth.

Narrative abstract:

The Approximate Number System (ANS) is a primitive mental system of nonverbal representations that supports an intuitive sense of number in human adults, children, infants, and other animal species. The numerical approximations produced by the ANS are characteristically imprecise and, in humans, this precision gradually improves from infancy to adulthood. Throughout development, wide ranging individual differences in ANS precision are evident within age groups. These individual differences have been linked to formal mathematics outcomes, based on concurrent, retrospective, or short-term longitudinal correlations observed during the school age years. However, it remains unknown whether this approximate number sense actually serves as a foundation for these school mathematics abilities. Here we show that ANS precision measured at preschool, prior to formal instruction in mathematics, selectively predicts performance on school mathematics at 6 years of age. In contrast, ANS precision does not predict non-numerical cognitive abilities. To our knowledge, these results provide the first evidence for early ANS precision, measured before the onset of formal education, predicting later mathematical abilities.

Link to full text: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023749

Submitted By: Michelle P. Hill

Category: Academic Achievement

]]>