Number Competency Essay

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Children’s number competence was measured using the number competency core battery (Jordan et al., 2009) . Seven subtests were included in the number competency core battery, namely, counting task, number recognition, number comparison, nonverbal calculation, story problems, and number combinations. Considering that nursery children have limited mathematics knowledge, story problems (8 items; e.g., “Mike has 6 pennies. Peter takes away 4 of her pennies. How many pennies does Mike have now?”) and number combinations (8 items; e.g., “How much is 2 and 1?”) subtests were not conducted in the present study. Thus, the present study included five subtests involving 34 items. Similar tasks have been used to test three-year-olds (Lee, Lembke, Moore, …show more content…

The counting principles task consisting of 8 items ( e.g., Geary, Hoard, & Hamson, 1999) assessed three counting principles, namely, one-to-one correspondence principle, cardinality principle, and order-irrelevance principle. For each item, an array of colored dots (alternating yellow and blue) was shown. Then a finger puppet told the child that he was learning to count. The child needed to indicate whether the way the puppet counted was “OK” or “not OK.” Three types of trials were used, correct counts, correct but unusual counts and incorrect counts. Correct counts involved counting from left to right and right to left. Correct but unusual counts involved counting the blue dots first and then the yellow dots or counting the yellow dots first and then the blue dots. For incorrect counts, the puppet counted left to right but counted the first dot twice. One point was assigned to each correct answer. The number recognition test involved 7 items in which the child was asked to name a series of visually presented numbers one by one (2, 8, 9, 13, 37, 82, and 124). The number comparison test involved 8 items (e.g., Griffin, 2002), given a number (e.g., 7), the child was asked what number comes after that

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