https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4402-2557
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Abstract
The current longitudinal study measured 279 kindergartners’ (Mage=5.76 years; SD = 0.55; 135 females) place value understanding using both approximate and syntactic measures based on previous evidence that early variation in performance on approximate measures was associated with subsequent syntactic place value understanding. In the present study, we used the same dataset but traced kindergarten variation on both approximate and syntactic measures to children’s multidigit calculation skill in second grade. Path analyses indicated that latent approximate place value knowledge predicted later multidigit calculation performance but more precise understanding of counts and base-ten units did not. However, among the individual task predictors, Base-Ten Counting was the strongest predictor followed by a task asking for specific count of units (e.g. ‘Which number has [two tens]?') and reading and writing number names (Transcoding). Thus, multidigit calculation skills appear to develop from an emerging, but imprecise understanding of count + unit syntax.
Acknowledgements
We thank all the children who participated in this study, as well as their parents and school district personnel, for their generous cooperation. This manuscript is a secondary analysis of an existing dataset, and portions of the method section closely resemble the method sections from our previous publications based on these data.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are publicly available on the University of Maryland’s data repository (DRUM) (https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/21495).