Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Index 347
Contributors
xi
xii Contributors
Alice Klein, Center for Early Learning, STEM Program, WestEd, San Francisco, CA,
United States
Josh Langfus, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States
Susan C. Levine, Department of Psychology; Department of Comparative Human
Development; Committee on Education, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL,
United States
Melissa E. Libertus, Department of Psychology and Learning Research and
Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, United States
Alejandro Maiche, Centro de Investigación Básica en Psicologı́a, Montevideo,
Uruguay
Álvaro Mailhos, Centro de Investigación Básica en Psicologı́a, Montevideo, Uruguay
Amelia S. Malone, Department of Special Education, Vanderbilt University,
Nashville, TN, United States
Kathleen Mann Koepke, National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver
National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, Bethesda, MD,
United States
Amy R. Napoli, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Purdue
University, West Lafayette, IN, United States
David J. Purpura, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Purdue
University, West Lafayette, IN, United States
Geetha B. Ramani, Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodol-
ogy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States
Julie Sarama, Morgridge College of Education, Marsico Institute, University of
Denver, Denver, CO, United States
Nicole R. Scalise, Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology,
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States
Pamela M. Seethaler, Department of Special Education, Vanderbilt University,
Nashville, TN, United States
Prentice Starkey, Center for Early Learning, STEM Program, WestEd, San Francisco,
CA, United States
Xenia Vamvakoussi, Department of Early Childhood Education, University of
Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece
John Woodward, School of Education, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA,
United States
Foreword: Cognitive
Foundations for Improving
Mathematical Learning
Ann Dowker
Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom
In recent years, there has been increased interest in early mathematical develop-
ment. This has included both interest in the domain-general and domain-specific
underpinnings of early mathematical development (Chu, van Marle, & Geary,
2015; Hannula, Lepola, & Lehtinen, 2010; Hohol, Cipora, Willmes, & Nuerk,
2017), and interest in early interventions to ameliorate and where possible
prevent mathematical difficulties (Butterworth, Varma, & Laurillard, 2011;
Clements & Sarama, 2011; Cohen Kadosh, Dowker, Heine, Kaufmann, &
Kucian, 2013; Dowker, 2017; Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2012). On the whole,
these areas have tended to be studied and discussed separately, though a better
understanding of the foundations of early numerical abilities could make it
much easier to develop suitable interventions. This book makes a very important
contribution to our knowledge and understanding by bringing together and inte-
grating the topics of cognitive foundations and interventions in mathematics and
reviewing recent work in these areas.
In the introductory chapter, the editors David Geary, Daniel Berch, and
Kathleen Mann Koepke explore the key issues of the book. They discuss both
the domain-general and domain-specific factors that contribute to mathematical
development and mathematical difficulties, and how different types of interven-
tions have addressed these. Domain-general factors include fluid intelligence and
executive function and working memory. There have been numerous attempts to
train children in domain-general abilities, especially working memory, and a few
individual results have appeared potentially promising (e.g., Klingberg, 2010).
However, as the editors and authors and others point out, there is little consistent
evidence that training in domain-general abilities transfers to tasks that are
dissimilar to those on which children have been trained (Melby-Verlag,
Redick, & Hulme, 2016; Sala & Gobet, 2017). In discussing the chapters,
xiii
xiv Foreword: Cognitive Foundations for Improving Mathematical Learning
I will group them not chronologically but thematically as follows: (1) those that
propose and discuss cognitive foundations of numeracy; (2) a chapter that dis-
cusses informal influences on children’s numeracy development, specifically
parental input; (3) those that describe and discuss the development and evalua-
tion of intervention programs; and (4) discussions of current problems with
interventions and how evaluations of their effectiveness might be improved.
Because of the integrative nature of the book, many of the chapters include
elements of more than one of these, but I will group the chapters according to
what appears to be the main focus.
school children of various ages, and have focused on the ways in which visual
representations may facilitate word problem solving. They review their own
and others’ studies, both of how the use of diagrams in text may improve per-
formance, and of how children may be encouraged to develop and use their
own visual representations.
Xenia Vamvakoussi discusses the importance in early numerical develop-
ment of another domain-general ability: analogical reasoning, whereby chil-
dren may make sense of unfamiliar situations by extrapolating from familiar
ones. The author points out that young children frequently use analogical
reasoning spontaneously, but often fail to use analogies generated by others
such as teachers. For example, children and even adolescents may fail to make
productive use of the analogy “numbers are points on the line.” The author
and colleagues found that secondary school pupils’ use of this analogy was
improved by explicit instruction as to its implications, and by the use of a
bridging analogy of a rubber number line.
Lynn Fuchs, Douglas Fuchs, Amelia Malone, Pamela Seethaler, and Caitlin
Craddock discuss the importance of understanding and using cognitive, linguis-
tic, and social-emotional processes in treating mathematics learning difficulties.
The authors discuss two ways in which this can be applied to interventions.
One is to include cognitive, linguistic and/or social-emotional processes within
direct skills interventions. For example, Fuchs, Fuchs, Craddock, Seethaler,
and Geary (2017) incorporated language comprehension training in an interven-
tion to improve primary school children’s word problem solving. Preliminary
results have suggested that this adds to the effectiveness of the intervention.
The other is to allocate different forms of direct skills interventions to groups
of pupils with different profiles of cognitive, linguistic and/or social-emotional
processes. For example, Fuchs et al. (2016) found that children with poor work-
ing memory and/or poor reasoning abilities benefitted more from a fractions
intervention if it included verbal explanations than if it involved word problem
training, whereas the reverse was true of children with better working memory
and reasoning.
experienced positive effects from being in schools, which were taking part in the
project, and receiving regular visits from the researchers. There was some sug-
gestion that the intervention had a positive effect on children, who were in the
lowest SES group and/or had repeated a grade.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, this book brings together many important and up-to-date the-
ories and findings that will stimulate much further research on the cognitive
foundations of numeracy and their applications to interventions to prevent
or ameliorate mathematical difficulties. It will also facilitate the development
of such interventions and help to ensure that they are truly evidence-based.
REFERENCES
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Research Journal, 24(5), 684–704.
Austin, A. M. B., Blevins-Knabe, B., Ota, C., Rowe, T., & Lindauer, S. L. K. (2011). Mediators of
preschoolers’ early mathematics concepts. Early Child Development and Care, 181, 1181–1198.
Foreword: Cognitive Foundations for Improving Mathematical Learning xix
Honore, N., & Noel, M. P. (2016). Improving preschoolers’ arithmetic through number magnitude
training: the impact of non-symbolic and symbolic training. PLoS ONE, 11, e0166685.
Klingberg, T. (2010). Training and plasticity of working memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
14(7), 317–324.
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Mazzocco, M. M. M., Feigenson, L., & Halberda, J. (2011). Pre-schoolers’ precision of the
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Melby-Verlag, M., Redick, C., & Hulme, C. (2016). Working memory training does not improve
performance on measures of intelligence or other measures of “far transfer”: evidence from a
meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 512–534.
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general relations to mathematics. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 122, 104–121.
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Preface
xxi
xxii Preface
David C. Geary
Daniel B. Berch
Kathleen Mann Koepke
Chapter 1
Introduction: Cognitive
Foundations for Improving
Mathematical Learning
David C. Geary*, Daniel B. Berch† and Kathleen Mann Koepke‡
*
Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, United States
†
Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States
‡
National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health &
Human Development, Bethesda, MD, United States
INTRODUCTION
Children’s acquisition of some level of competence with mathematics has
never been as important as it is today. Mathematical knowledge and skills
expand educational and employment opportunities and allow one to better nav-
igate the increasingly number-imbued realities of life in the modern world. As
the educational and economic benefits to mathematical knowledge increase,
so do the costs of falling behind. Reducing these costs by improving the
mathematical development of at-risk children will yield substantive real-world
benefits to these individuals and to the communities in which they will reside as
adults. As detailed by the authors in this volume, there are many ways to poten-
tially reduce these costs, from increasing parents’ engagement in numeracy-
related activities with their preschool children to formal interventions to better
prepare children for success when they enter school to interventions that
target core mathematical competencies (e.g., fractions). These interventions
provide some very promising initial steps toward the development of systematic
approaches toward ensuring that all children will eventually have the mathemat-
ical knowledge needed for functioning in educational, employment, and day-
to-day contexts, but much remains to be learned.
The chapters in this volume largely provide reviews of specific interven-
tions or classes of intervention, including issues surrounding fadeout (loss of
intervention gains over time). In our introductory chapter, we step back and
begin with an overview of intervention work more generally, including
A HIVATÁSOS TÖRVÉNYHOZÓ.
TÖRVÉNYEK A DEMOKRÁCIÁBAN.