Does 1 + 1 = 2nd? The relations between children’s understanding of ordinal position and their arithmetic performance

Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Volume 187Author(s): Chi-Ngai Cheung, Stella F. LourencoAbstractThe current study examined the relations between 5- and 6-year-olds’ understanding of ordinality and their mathematical competence. We focused specifically on “positional operations,” a property of ordinality not contingent on magnitude, in an effort to better understand the unique contributions of position-based ordinality to math development. Our findings revealed that two types of positional operations—the ability to execute representational movement along letter sequences and the ability to update ordinal positions after item insertion or removal—predicted children’s arithmetic performance. Nevertheless, these positional operations did not mediate the relation between magnitude processing (as measured by the acuity of the approximate number system) and arithmetic performance. Taken together, these findings suggest a unique role for positional ordinality in math development. We suggest that positional ordinality may aid children in their mental organization of number symbols, which may facilitate solving arithmetic computations and may support the development of novel numerical concepts.
Source: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology - Category: Child Development Source Type: research