title: Children's mathematical performance: five cognitive tasks across five grades.
abstract: Children in elementary school, along with college adults, were tested on a battery of basic mathematical tasks, including digit naming, number comparison, dot enumeration, and simple addition or subtraction. Beyond cataloguing performance to these standard tasks in Grades 1 to 5, we also examined relationships among the tasks, including previously reported results on a number line estimation task. Accuracy and latency improved across grades for all tasks, and classic interaction patterns were found, for example, a speed-up of subitizing and counting, increasingly shallow slopes in number comparison, and progressive speeding of responses especially to larger addition and subtraction problems. Surprisingly, digit naming was faster than subitizing at all ages, arguing against a pre-attentive processing explanation for subitizing. Estimation accuracy and speed were strong predictors of children's addition and subtraction performance. Children who gave exponential responses on the number line estimation task were slower at counting in the dot enumeration task and had longer latencies on addition and subtraction problems. The results provided further support for the importance of estimation as an indicator of children's current and future mathematical expertise.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA. Electronic address: moorealex@missouri.edu.
authors: Alex M
authors: AM
authors: Moore
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA. Electronic address: mark.ashcraft@unlv.edu.
authors: Mark H
authors: MH
authors: Ashcraft
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D055641:Mathematical Concepts; D008433:Mathematics; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D013850:Thinking; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Arithmetic; Children’s mathematics; Estimation; Number; Number magnitude; Subitizing