How Best to Teach the Cardinality Principle?

• In Event: 72.049 - Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 72.049-7 - Effective Strategy Use in Mathematics Education

Abstract

The results of only one study (Mix et al., 2012) on teaching the cardinality principle (CP)—a critically important aspect of numeracy (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010; Frye et al., 2013), are uncertain. The present study was designed to investigate the best modeling procedure to teach the CP. Forty-nine 3- to 5-year-old children received intervention after random assignment (label-first, count-first, or count-only group). Both count-first and label-first groups outperformed the counting-only group on the CP task at a delayed posttest. Moreover, the count-first group outperformed the other groups. The results underscore the need for early childhood educators to reinforce the purpose of counting (determining a collection’s total) by labeling and then emphasizing the number of items counted.

Authors

• Veena Paliwal, University of West Georgia

• Arthur J. Baroody, University of Denver and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign