The Mastering of the Cardinality Principle in a Sample of Italian Preschool Children
Francesco Sella, Daniela Lucangeli, Marco Zorzi
The acquisition of counting principles represents a milestone in the development of mathematical skills. With age and experience, children learn to associate external numerosities with the corresponding number-words. According to the knower-level theory, children sequentially learn the cardinal meaning of number-words from 1 to 4 (Subset-knowers) before extending the cardinality principle to the entire counting list (Cardinal-Principle knowers). The give-a-number task is a widely used tool to assess children’s knower-level by asking them to create some numerical sets. In this study, we present the procedure to administer the give-a-number task with the associated analysis to classify children according to their knower-level. We administered the give-a-number task to a sample of 148 Italian preschool children. The results display how children fit in all the proposed knower-level, even though Italian children appear to become cardinal-principle knowers later compared to children from other countries.
Keywords
Counting, Knower-level, Give-a-number, Preschool children, Cognitive development.