Enactive experience promotes early number understanding: a study with 3-year-old children

ABSTRACT

We investigated the hypothesis that embodied action improves early numerical cognition and learning by means of an experimental study with young children. The influence of children’s enactive participation was analysed in a playful situation that posed different number-related tasks regarding quantities 1–5. Participants were 44 3-year-old children who were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: Enaction or Observation. In the Enaction group, children were encouraged to establish a direct contact with the playful materials, while in the Observation group they were encouraged to observe the demonstrations by the experimenter. Participants in both conditions started from a similar baseline quantification performance; however, the Enaction group systematically outperformed the Observation group across number tasks. This was so both when overall performance was compared and when fine-grained analyses by magnitude within tasks were conducted. These robust findings point at the beneficial impact of enactive experience for initial number understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive development
• small numbers
• enaction
• observation
• teaching numbers

Acknowledgments

We thank Eduardo Martí, for his helpful comments on the manuscript and Milay Opatowsky for her help in taking data. We gratefully acknowledge the helpful efforts of the schools and, especially, the children who participated with the generous consent of their parents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) under [grant number PIP 2014-0142], Universidad Nacional del Comahue under [grant number C130], and the Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica under [grand number 2014–1016].