The Development of Counting Skills in Preschool Children
Lucia Pacetta, Daniela Lucangeli, Francesco Sella
This research examined the development of early numerical skills in children between 3 and 6 years of age. We administered a new scale for early numeracy (Batteria Intelligenza Numerica, BIN) to a sample of 342 preschool children. The scale entails tasks assessing number acuity, number naming, cardinality, directionality, ordinality, number comparison and simple arithmetic. The scale is easy to administer and has good reliability. Children showed higher accuracy in all tasks with age. In particular, we highlighted that many children, despite having excellent enumeration and counting skills, still struggle with understanding the directionality of the counting list (i.e., successor and predecessor knowledge). These results return a detailed picture of number development and inform educational practices.
Keywords
Counting, Cardinality, Directionality, Development of numerical skills, Early numeracy, Preschool children, Numbers, Early numerical competences, Counting directionality, Mathematics, Basic numerical processes, Childhood, Children.