Knowledge of counting principles: how relevant is order irrelevance?
Most children who are older than 6 years of age apply essential counting principles when they enumerate a set of objects. Essential principles include (a) one-to-one correspondence between items and count words, (b) stable order of the count words, and (c) cardinality-that the last number refers to numerosity. We found that the acquisition of a fourth principle, that the order in which items are counted is irrelevant, follows a different trajectory. The majority of 5- to 11-year-olds indicated that the order in which objects were counted was relevant, favoring a left-to-right, top-to-bottom order of counting. Only some 10- and 11-year-olds applied the principle of order irrelevance, and this knowledge was unrelated to their numeration skill. We conclude that the order irrelevance principle might not play an important role in the development of children's conceptual knowledge of counting.
Kamawar
Deepthi
D
Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ont, Canada. deepthi_kamawar@carleton.ca
Lefevre
Jo-Anne
JA
Bisanz
Jeffrey
J
Fast
Lisa
L
Skwarchuk
Sheri-Lynn
SL
Smith-Chant
Brenda
B
Penner-Wilger
Marcie
M
D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D008433:Mathematics; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis