Subitising activity relative to units construction: a case study

ABSTRACT

Subitising, a quick apprehension of the numerosity of a small set of items, has been found to change from an individual's reliance on perceptual to conceptual processes. In this study, we utilised a constructivist teaching experiment methodology to investigate how the subitising activity of one preschool student, Amy, related to her construction of prenumerical units. Subitising and counting tasks were designed to assess and perturb Amy's thinking relative to her construction of units, and to observe changes in Amy's activity associated with the different tasks. Findings indicate that as Amy's subitising activity changed from perceptual to conceptual, she constructed subitised motor units and subitised figurative units. Implications of this study suggest that the construction of subitised units may support young children's later development of arithmetic units.

KEYWORDS:

• Subitising
• units construction
• early childhood mathematics

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jessica Hunt, Anderson Norton, and Catherine Ulrich for their feedback on this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank Joyce Xu and Steve Boyce for their role as witness during the teaching experiment sessions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Beth MacDonald http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5561-2026

Jesse L. M. Wilkins http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9362-6309

Notes

1 Throughout this article, unless otherwise qualified, the term “units” refers to prenumerical units based on perceptual understandings of number, as opposed to arithmetic units which are units based on a child's abstraction of their counting activity (c.f. Steffe & Cobb, 1988; Ulrich, 2015; Ulrich, 2016).