Poster #41 - The Role of Number Sense Certainty in Formal and Informal Math Abilities

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Why are some children good at math, and why do others struggle? Recent debates in understanding individual differences in young children’s math abilities has focused on the correlations between children’s intuitive number sense, often termed the Approximate Number System (ANS), and standardized tests, such as the TEMA-3, often reporting weak to moderate correlations between the two abilities. For example, children’s ability to discriminate briefly shown displays of dots has been shown to correlate with their informal math skills, such as counting or recognizing digits, even when controlling for potential covariates such as age, intelligence, working memory (Halberda, Mazzocco, Feigenson, 2008).

But, given that our intuitive, perceptual number sense does not strongly resemble the kinds of skills children mobilize to solve math problems, why are these two abilities correlated? Here, we explore whether the correlation between children’s ANS and informal math abilities can be explained by children’s certainty in their ANS: i.e., the degree to which children can decide when and whether their ANS would give them a reliable answer.

Four-to-seven-year-old children (N = 53) completed three tasks (Figure 1): (a) the TEMA-3, a standardized math test measuring both formal and informal math abilities; (b) the ANS Discrimination task (i.e., deciding whether there are more blue or yellow dots shown on a screen), measuring individual differences in their intuitive number sense; and (c) the ANS Certainty task, where children were given a choice of two blue and yellow dot trials – one easy, one difficult – and could choose which one they wanted to attempt. Critically, by varying the relative difficulty between the two presented trials, we could identify children who could either only tell apart very large differences in certainty (e.g., “I am very sure of this one” vs. “I am guessing”) vs. children who could more finely tell apart how reliable their answers are given smaller differences in certainty (e.g., “I am very sure of this one” vs. “I am somewhat sure of this one”).

Our results replicated previously reported correlations between the ANS Discrimination task and the TEMA-3, even when controlling for age: we found a robust correlation between the two abilities, r(51) = .40; p = .003, see Figure 2. We additionally found that this correlation was only significant for the informal problems, r(51) = .39; p = .004, and not for the formal problems, r(51) = .19; p = .19. In contrast, however, we found that individual differences in children’s ANS certainty did not correlate with the TEMA-3, r(51) = .24; p = .09, see Figure 2, suggesting that children’s ability to tell how reliable their ANS is does not contribute to their math abilities.

Authors

• Brionne McWilliams, University of British Columbia
  Presenting Author

• Carolyn Baer, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Darko Odic, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author