Study On Mathematical Ability And Its Influence Factors In Preschool Children

According to Piaget's cognitive development theory,children's mathematical ability is one of the most important concepts.Piaget thought the development of children's cognitive thinking started in the development of the concept of number.The standard of preoperational stage is the appearance of symbol function.Therefore,the research on the mathematical ability of children is widely concerned by researchers all over the world,but the results of the influence factors on the children's mathematical ability are not completely consistent.Past studies have shown that general cognitive ability has influence to the mathematical ability,but the ability of number sense whether affect mathematical ability or not are inconsistent,some researchers argue that the general cognitive ability affect number sense,then the number sense predict mathematical ability,but they did not investigate this hypnosis using empirical researches.This study attempts to adopt longitudinal design and to subdivide children's mathematical ability to count,number sequence and ordinal number ability,mode construction and symbolic computation ability to verify the four research objectives:(1)To explore the development status of children's mathematical ability;(2)To verify the conclusions of previous studies on the impact of general cognitive ability on mathematical ability;(3)To provide new evidence for the inconsistency between the number of senses in past studies and whether they affect the ability of mathematics;(4)To investigate whether the general cognitive ability can predict the mathematical ability by influencing the number sense ability.So we choose 115 young children as subjects,who just entrance the kindergarten for a month.According to two and a half years of longitudinal tracking experiment,trying to explore the current situation of the development of children's mathematical ability and establish the children's mathematical ability influence factor model.The first study was focused on the development status and gender difference of mathematics ability in young children.The subjects were 115 young children(69 boys)and their average age was 4.6 years old.Mathematical ability tests including count,number sequence and ordinal number test,mode construction test and symbolic computation test.The statistical results shown that the ability of count and number sequence and ordinal number of children in the age of four and a half were well developed,the mode construction ability has been developed,but the development level of symbolic computation ability is low.Consistent with the new Piaget theory,young children develop several concepts and cognitive logic through the ability to count.In addition,there were significant gender differences in the count test,and girls' score were significant higher than that of boys.The second study investigated the influence factors of young children's mathematical ability.According to Spearman's two-factor theory,general and special factors are the basis of all intellectual activities.Therefore,the research on the influence factors of children's different mathematical abilities through longitudinal experimental design is studied,and the model is established according to theory and hypnosis.The subjects of study two were the same of study one,who were new to kindergarten and the average age was 3.14 years.Experiments including blocks task,picture memory task,the symbol compare tasks and digital rapid naming task,respectively test the visual spatial ability and working memory capacity,number sense ability and speed of information processing.The results shown that(1)the general cognitive ability and the number sense ability affect the different aspects of mathematics ability.T2 working memory ability positively predicted T3 count ability;T2 visual spatial ability,number sense ability and processing speed predicted sequence and ordinal ability;T2 visual spatial ability positively predicted T3 mode construction ability;T2 visual spatial ability,number sense ability and processing speed predict T3 symbolic calculation ability.(2)T1 visual spatial ability affected T2 number sense,then predicted mathematical abilities in T3.(3)There was no significant gender difference in general cognitive ability and number sense test.Generally speaking,the abilities of children aged 3 to 5 are in the development stage.What is consistent with previous studies is that general cognitive ability has an effect on mathematical ability.The results of the study supported the conclusion that the number sense ability has influence on the mathematics ability.In addition,general cognitive abilities affected number sense and then affected mathematical ability.In this study,the above conclusions are discussed and the corresponding suggestions are put forward.