Children's understandings of counting: detection of errors and pseudoerrors by kindergarten and primary school children.
In this study, the development of comprehension of essential and nonessential aspects of counting is examined in children ranging from 5 to 8 years of age. Essential aspects, such as logical rules, and nonessential aspects, including conventional rules, were studied. To address this, we created a computer program in which children watched counting errors (abstraction and order irrelevance errors) and pseudoerrors (with and without cardinal value errors) occurring during a detection task. The children judged whether the characters had counted the items correctly and were asked to justify their responses. In general, our data show that performance improved substantially with age in terms of both error and pseudoerror detection; furthermore, performance was better with regard to errors than to pseudoerrors as well as on pseudoerror tasks with cardinal values versus those without cardinal values. In addition, the children's justifications, for both the errors and pseudoerrors, made possible the identification of conventional rules underlying the incorrect responses. A particularly relevant trend was that children seem to progressively ignore these rules as they grow older. Nevertheless, this process does not end at 8 years of age given that the conventional rules of temporal and spatial adjacency were present in their judgments and were primarily responsible for the incorrect responses.
Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Facultad de Psicología, Complutense University of Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, 28223 Madrid, Spain. p.marcos@psi.ucm.es
Purificación
P
Rodríguez
M Oliva
MO
Lago
Ileana
I
Enesco
Silvia
S
Guerrero
D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D055641:Mathematical Concepts; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis