Abstract
Socioeconomic status (SES) has been shown to be associated with children’s arithmetic knowledge as early as kindergarten, which is an important issue, given that early numeracy knowledge and skills usually correlate to later academic achievement in arithmetic. In line with recent research, it is argued that the regular practice of exercises involving cardinality, ordinality and arithmetic transformations during class time could accelerate the progress of children, particularly among low-SES children. Participants were 118 kindergarteners (Mage = 3.87). Teachers were randomly assigned to the intervention group (immediate implementation of the intervention; N = 64) or the control group (intervention delayed, N = 54). This intervention consisted of playful exercises involving quantities and numerical transformations. The results indicated that the intervention tended to accelerate progress on the verbal numerical sequence, particularly among lower-SES children. In addition, the intervention tended to accelerate progress on cardinality and arithmetic. These results provide preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of the intervention to help children acquire basic mathematical skills.
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Data availability statement
The data and materials from the present study are openly available on osf.io/ktp4v.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Cécile Compeau, Caroline Ravizy, Emmanuelle Neuville, and Claire Migne for their involvement in data collection. We also wish to thank Corine Sancier, Christine Fournet-Fayas, and all the teachers who collaborated on this project. Their commitment was highly appreciated.
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This research was supported by a Convention from the Ministère de l’Education Nationale (MEN, APPMATHSMAT).
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Céline Darnon. Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive et Sociale, LAPSCO (UMR6024), CNRS, Université Clermont Auvergne. celine.darnon@uca.fr. Current themes of research: Céline Darnon is a social psychologist, specialized in the area of education. Her research examines the impact of pedagogical practices on learning, in particular among disadvantaged students. She also examines how the values promoted in the educational system affect students’ goals and motivation and can contribute to increasing the socioeconomic status achievement gap. Most relevant publications in the field of Psychology of Education: Crouzevialle, M., Darnon, C. (2019). On the academic disadvantage of low social class individuals: Pursuing performance goals fosters the emergence of the achievement gap. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(7), 1261–1272. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000349. Darnon, C., Jury, M., & Aelenei, C. (2018). Who benefits from mastery-approach and performance-approach goals in college? Students’ social class as a moderator of the link between goals and grade. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 33(4), 713-726. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-017-0351-z. Darnon, C., Smeding, A., & Redersdorff, S. (2018). Belief in school meritocracy as an ideological barrier to the promotion of equality. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48(4), 523-534. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.2347. Jury, M., Bruno, A., & Darnon, C. (2018). Doing better (or worse) than one’s parents: Social status, mobility and performance-avoidance goals. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(4), 659-674. doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12210
Michel Fayol. Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive et Sociale, LAPSCO(UMR6024), CNRS, Université Clermont Auvergne. michel.fayol@uca.fr. Current themes of research: Michel Fayol is a developmental psychologist specialized in the acquisition of numerical and writing skills. More precisely, he has carried out a wide range of research, from the acquisition of numbers to the resolution of arithmetic problems. His research examines the process through which children develop arithmetic abilities and the contexts that may trigger the emergence of these skills. Most relevant publications in the field of Psychology of Education: Droit-Volet, S., Clément, A., & Fayol, M. (2003). Time and number discrimination in a bisection task with a sequence of stimuli: A developmental approach. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 84 (1), 63-76. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-0965(02)00180-7.
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Darnon, C., Fayol, M. Can an early mathematical intervention boost the progress of children in kindergarten? A field experiment. Eur J Psychol Educ 37, 1–18 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-021-00550-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-021-00550-4