Kindergartners’ Spontaneous Focusing on Numerosity in Relation to Their Number-Related Utterances During Numerical Picture Book Reading

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the relationship between kindergartners’ Spontaneous Focusing on Numerosity (SFON) and their number-related utterances during numerical picture book reading. Forty-eight 4- to 5-year-olds were individually interviewed via a SFON Imitation Task and a numerical picture book reading activity. We expected differences in the frequency of number-related utterances during picture book reading between children with a higher SFON score, providing more number-related utterances, and children with a lower SFON score. Our results showed large inter-individual differences in both kindergartners’ SFON and the frequency of their number-related utterances during picture book reading, yet SFON was not related to the frequency of number-related utterances. This unexpected result is discussed in terms of its scientific, methodological, and educational implications.

Notes

¹ In Flanders (Belgium), kindergarten starts at the age of 3 years and consists of 3 years. These 3 years of kindergarten are preceded by some months in a “preparatory” class, starting at the age of 2 years 6 months. At the age of 6 years, children start the first grade of elementary education.

² The SFON Imitation Task used in the present study is analogous to the task offered to 6-year-olds in Hannula and Lehtinen (2005). We decided to use this version of the task as a large longitudinal (not yet published) study, that was ongoing at the time of the set-up of our study, indicated that this Elsi bird task version could be used appropriately with 4- to 5-year-old children.

³ To control for the contribution of children’s verbal skills to the formulation of number-related utterances, we corrected for total word count during the reading activity in all further analyses.

⁴ Batchelor’s doctoral studies (2014) were not yet available during the set-up of this study.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by Grant GOA 2012/10 “Number sense: analysis and improvement” and Grant DBOF/12/009 “Early mediators of number sense” from the Research Fund KU Leuven, Belgium.