Predicting Children's Reading and Mathematics Achievement from Early Quantitative Knowledge and Domain-General Cognitive Abilities

Abstract

One hundred children (44 boys) participated in a 3-year longitudinal study of the development of basic quantitative competencies and the relation between these competencies and later mathematics and reading achievement. The children's preliteracy knowledge, intelligence, executive functions, and parental educational background were also assessed. The quantitative tasks assessed a broad range of symbolic and nonsymbolic knowledge and were administered four times across 2 years of preschool. Mathematics achievement was assessed at the end of each of 2 years of preschool, and mathematics and word reading achievement were assessed at the end of kindergarten. Our goals were to determine how domain-general abilities contribute to growth in children's quantitative knowledge and to determine how domain-general and domain-specific abilities contribute to children's preschool mathematics achievement and kindergarten mathematics and reading achievement. We first identified four core quantitative competencies (e.g., knowledge of the cardinal value of number words) that predict later mathematics achievement. The domain-general abilities were then used to predict growth in these competencies across 2 years of preschool, and the combination of domain-general abilities, preliteracy skills, and core quantitative competencies were used to predict mathematics achievement across preschool and mathematics and word reading achievement at the end of kindergarten. Both intelligence and executive functions predicted growth in the four quantitative competencies, especially across the first year of preschool. A combination of domain-general and domain-specific competencies predicted preschoolers' mathematics achievement, with a trend for domain-specific skills to be more strongly related to achievement at the beginning of preschool than at the end of preschool. Preschool preliteracy skills, sensitivity to the relative quantities of collections of objects, and cardinal knowledge predicted reading and mathematics achievement at the end of kindergarten. Preliteracy skills were more strongly related to word reading, whereas sensitivity to relative quantity was more strongly related to mathematics achievement. The overall results indicate that a combination of domain-general and domain-specific abilities contribute to development of children's early mathematics and reading achievement.

Developmental change in the influence of domain-general abilities and domain-specific knowledge on mathematics achievement: An eight-year longitudinal study.

“…Nevertheless, the combination of standard IQ scores and working memory used here will be highly correlated with fluid abilities (e.g., Conway, Cowan, Bunting, Therriault, & Minkoff, 2002; Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999; Deary, 2000; Geary, 2005), and therefore our results, though not definitive, are consistent with Cattell’s hypothesis. With the inclusion of prior reading achievement in the set of domain-general variables, our results could also be interpreted as being consistent with Carroll’s (1993) general intelligence that subsumes fluid intelligence and other processes that influence learning; including ease of associative learning that may underlie the relation between word reading and mathematics achievement (Chu et al, 2016; Koponen et al, 2013). However the results are framed, the key finding is that domain-general abilities, including those assessed 7 years earlier, influence mathematics achievement throughout much of formal schooling, even with control of domain-specific competencies.…”

Prevention: Necessary But Insufficient? A 2‐Year Follow‐Up of an Effective First‐Grade Mathematics Intervention

“…Start‐of‐first‐grade letter knowledge and word reading offered additional predictive value, in line with prior work showing a relation between early literacy skills and later mathematics achievement (Chu et al., ; Göbel et al., ). Ease of learning words and memorizing basic arithmetic facts tends to co‐occur (Geary, ; Koponen et al., ), potentially because they rely on the same brain and cognitive systems that support symbol and number and arithmetic fact learning (Holloway, Battista, Vogel, & Ansari, ; Yeo, Wilkey, & Price, ).…”

“…Four of these variables were measures of cognitive and linguistic processes associated with individual differences in mathematics development: working memory, listening comprehension, nonverbal reasoning, and processing speed (e.g., Fuchs, Geary, Fuchs, Compton, & Hamlett, 2014;Fuchs, Gilbert, Powell, Cirino, Fuchs, Hamlett, Seethaler, & Tolar;2016;Geary, Bailey, & Hoard, 2009;Swanson & Beebe-Frankenberger, 2004), factors for which increases in arithmetic fluency could plausibly compensate in children's subsequent mathematics learning. The fifth variable, word-reading skill, was included given evidence of developmental parallels between early calculation and word reading (Chu, vanMarle, & Geary, 2016;G€ obel, Watson, Lerv ag, & Hulme, 2014;Koponen, Salmi, Eklund, & Aro, 2013), evidence that students with concurrent math and reading difficulty experience worse outcomes in each area than do peers with difficulty in one domain (Cirino, Fuchs, Elias, Powell, & Schumacher, 2015;Willcutt et al, 2013), and prior evidence that such comorbidity is associated with less adequate response to generally effective intervention (Fuchs, Fuchs, & Prentice, 2004;Fuchs, Geary, et al, 2013). We relied on these same five variables to investigate pathways associated with responsiveness versus unresponsiveness to intervention.…”

“…In particular, the same level of math skill may reflect greater underlying cognitive, developmental, and contextual advantages in children who did not receive an effective math intervention than in children who did. Models that account for potential differences between within-and between-child variation (for review, see Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & Van Heerden, 2003) in math skills may yield more accurate predictions about the long-term patterns of impacts after effective math intervention ends. This problem is worthy of additional attention in cognitive developmental research to increase our ability to make useful predictions about long-term effects of interventions based on longitudinal nonexperimental data.…”

The relation between subitizable symbolic and non‐symbolic number processing over the kindergarten school year

“…Lyons et al, ; Matejko & Ansari, ; Mussolin et al, ; Sasanguie et al, ). While there is a body of literature demonstrating a link between AMS acuity and later symbolic number knowledge (Chu, VanMarle, & Geary, , ; Elliott, Feigenson, Halberda, & Libertus, ; Geary et al, ; Shusterman, Slusser, Halberda, & Odic, ), these studies tend to be limited in their ability to make directional inferences regarding the relation between symbolic and non‐symbolic processing. More specifically, while many of these studies are longitudinal in nature (i.e.…”