Competing features influence children’s attention to number

Verbal and action‐based measures of kindergartners' SFON and their associations with number‐related utterances during picture book reading

“…Another possible explanation for this limited convergence between the action‐based and verbal SFON tasks is that SFON is heavily influenced by the task context. Initial support for this explanation comes from a recent study by Chan and Mazzocco (), who found discrepancies in children's attention to number across different task contexts varying in the relative salience of number. In a similar vein, Batchelor and Pickering () recently showed that not only different response modes (i.e., action vs. verbal), but also other task features, such as the number of competing non‐numerical dimensions (i.e., few vs. many dimensions to focus on) and the type of stimuli (i.e., dynamic vs. static stimuli) might explain why verbal and action‐based SFON tasks do not correlate, again suggesting that SFON is dependent on the task context.…”

Specific Preschool Executive Functions Predict Unique Aspects of Mathematics Development: A 3‐Year Longitudinal Study

“…This combined EF factor explained 15% of variance in the performance on tasks measuring the quantity–number concept (QNC Level II) 1 year later, at the end of Grade 1. Grasping the sense of numbers involves shifting between different kinds of information and blocking out irrelevant information like shape, color, or size of objects, that means inhibition in order to successfully focus on a setting's numerosity (see Chan & Mazzocco, ; Viterbori et al., ). Furthermore, we suggest that inhibition and shifting processes are relevant when number words, quantities, and digits have to be flexibly combined at QNC Level II.…”

Preschoolers’ reasoning about numbers in picture books

“…A book can be considered an artifact or a tool for teaching, but "[n]o one would expect a tool to do the work on its own" (Nührenbörger & Steinbring, 2008, p. 158). As described above, previous research has shown that attention to numbers is not to be taken for granted, in either general numerical situations (Hannula et al, 2005(Hannula et al, , 2007Chan & Mazzocco, 2017) or picture book reading (Elia et al, 2010). Further, earlier studies based on variation theory show that teachers' actions in speech, gestures or pointing, aiming to link connections between and within the content in question, facilitate the necessary aspects to be discerned and further explored by the children (Ekdahl et al, 2016).…”

“…Mathematical skills are necessary in order to direct focus on aspects of numbers in everyday situations but children's directionality to numbers and number relations may also be one key component in mathematical development (McMullen et al, 2019). This finding is supported by Chan and Mazzocco (2017), who showed that young children seldom operate on matching tasks based on numbers when, for example, shape and color are competing features. Rathé et al (2016) could also not find significant relations between preschool children's ability to spontaneously focus on numbers and the amount of number-related utterances found when reading picture books.…”