Do the Colors of Educational Number Tools Improve Children’s Mathematics and Numerosity?

Abstract

Julia (2020) Do the colors of educational number-tools improve children's mathematics and numerosity? Child Development, 91 (4). e799-e813.

Personality profile of child synaesthetes

“…R = red, G = Green) or from having a superior memory span. We name these high-performing non-synaesthetes 4 , and the goal of Session 2 was to divide the potential synaesthete group into true synaesthetes versus high- 3 To be maximally inclusive in identifying potential synaesthetes at this earliest stage, we repeated this process replacing 1SD with 1.5SD, and we repeated a third time where we compared colours by their colour category (i.e., we converted RGB values to the 11 basic colour terms in English, following (45)). Each method produced its own distribution of Letter-scores and Number-scores (from which we identified high-performing children 1.96SD over the mean; see below).…”

Numeracy skills in child synaesthetes: Evidence from grapheme-colour synaesthesia

“…Our in-house maths test came from Rinaldi, Smees, Alvarez et al (2019), and assessed key components from the UK primary school mathematics curriculum ("The national curriculum in England: Key stages 1 and 2 framework document," 2013). This pencil-and-paper test had 47 questions in total, which represented one question for each of the 7-9 topics per year -across six school years (Years 1-6).…”

“…As in Rinaldi, Smees, Alvarez et al (2019), our task was the Panamath dot numerosity task (Halberda et al, 2008) available from http://panamath.org/, which we presented with a tasktime of 2 minutes, and default settings which generate an adjusted level of difficulty based on each child's age (entered in whole years). This test briefly presents a cluster of white dots adjacent to a cluster of black dots (1382 -1951ms dependent on age; see Figure 2 for screenshot).…”

“…One recent study has suggested that pairing colour with numbers could be tied to advantages in numerosity, even for non-synaesthetes. Rinaldi, Smees, Alvarez, and Simner (2019) looked at the pairing of colour with number in educational maths tools such as Numicon (Oxford University Press, 2018). Numicon is a learning tool which comprises ten colour-coded plastic shapes, corresponding to the numbers 1-10 (e.g., the shape for number 5 has five holes and is coloured red).…”

ColourSpot, a novel gamified tablet-based test for accurate diagnosis of color vision deficiency in young children

“…Ninety percent of adults with CVD encounter problems in their daily lives (Steward & Cole, 1989), while children with CVD are at risk of social, behavioral and emotional difficulties, and adverse educational outcomes (Grassivaro Gallo et al, 1998Gallo et al, , 2002Suero et al, 2005;Thomas et al, 2018;Thuline, 1964). Educational materials, especially those for young children, such as reading schemes or mathematics activities (Birch, 2001), typically rely on color as a learning tool (Rinaldi et al, 2020;Suero et al, 2005), which makes them less accessible for children with CVD. In fact, one simulation of CVD suggests that 10% of tasks in educational textbooks are inaccessible for a child with CVD (Torrents et al, 2011).…”