The Study On The Development Of Number Sense And Estimation In Young Children Aged 3-6

The purpose of this study was to investigate the developmental characteristics in young children's numerosity estimation and number sense, and the relationship among children's numerosity estimation abilities, number sense development, and cardinal number concept ability. A sample of 180 children aged 3-6 was randomly selected from 325 children in 12 classes in two ordinary preschools in shanghai.The test to assess young children's number sense in this study was adapted from the measure created by Malofeeva and colleagues (Malofeeva, Day, Saco, Young, & Ciancio, 2004), and the other test to examinate young children's numerosity estimation abilities was adapted from Chen and McNamee's study (Chen, & McNamee, in press). The study examined the statues of young children's numerosity estimation and number sense by means of Descriptive Statistics; the effects of age and gender on their performances of the numerosity estimation and number sense using MANOVA; the relationship among their numerosity estimation abilities, number sense development, and cardinal number concept abilities through Correlation Analysis. The implication of the study was also discussed.The result indicated that the children between 3 and 6 years had the numerosity estimation abilities, but with low level of the reasonable estimation. Especially for the children aged 3 to 4, more of their estimations fell into "wild guessing"; that the children aged 4 to 5 had the abilities to conduct a well-founded estimation; with their numerosity estimating levels being influenced by the size of the target numerosity, their numerosity estimating abilities had the significant age differences on all the tasks; that young children had used many kinds of estimation strategies, also with the age differences; and that the children between 5 to 6 years appeared using more kinds of strategies, while the children aged 3 to 4 often could not report their use of strategies; that age was significantly related to children's performance on each part of the number sense test except for "the object comparison" and on the whole number sense;The significant positive correlation emerged among children's performance on number concept, performance on number sense and performance on numerosity estimation. But no gender discrimination was found on the children's estimation and on the number sense.