Development Of Children’s Number Sense And Its Correlation With Mathematic Academic Achievement In Grade 1-3

Number sense is listed as the first of the ten core concepts in compulsory education mathematics curriculum standards and is a hot issue in mathematics education research.The lower part of primary school(grade 1 to grade 3)is the critical period for the development of children’s number sense.To investigate the characteristics of the development of children’s number sense and the relationship between the development of children’s number sense and their mathematical academic achievement can provide guidance for the cultivation of pupils’ number sense.Previous studies on number sense mainly focused on middle school students or adults,and most of the studies on early number sense also focused on children in preschool or high grade of primary school.Most of the studies used transverse studies,questionnaires and behavioral measurement as the research tools,while relatively few studies on the electrophysiological basis of number sense processing.Based on this,in order to fill the gap of the research on number sense of children in low school,the following questions were raised :(1)What are the characteristics of the development of number sense behavior of children in grade 1 to grade 3?(2)What are the developmental characteristics of electrophysiological brain activity related to number sense processing in first-to third-graders?(3)What is the correlation between first-to third-graders’ sense of numbers and academic achievement in mathematics?In this study,52 first-graders from a primary school in Hangzhou were selected to perform the "number comparison" task and the event-related potential technique(ERPs)was used to investigate the electrophysiological characteristics of the brain during the number comparison task from two aspects of behavioral level and electrophysiological level.In this study,a longitudinal study was used to trace the subjects to the third grade to explore the developmental characteristics of number sense in children from the first to the third grade.At the same time,the number sense indicators at the behavioral level and the electrophysiological level were considered,so as to provide more powerful evidence for exploring the correlation between number sense and mathematical academic achievement.The results are as follows:(1)In the early stage of development(grade 1 to grade 3),the accuracy of children in both simple and difficult tasks increased first and then decreased,and the accuracy of children in grade 2 was the highest,which was significantly higher than that in grade 1 and grade 3.There were significant differences in the accuracy of simple task(1:2)and difficult task(3:4),and the accuracy of simple task was significantly higher than that of difficult task.(2)In the early stages of development(grade 1 to grade 3),children’s number sense development has similarities on the electrophysiological level.No matter how difficult the task was,children of all three grades showed right-sided lateralization.However,children of different grades also have different electrophysiological characteristics.In the sensitivity of task difficulty,first-graders show logarithmic sensitivity in the right hemisphere,but not in the left hemisphere.The second-and third-graders showed no sensitivity to the difficulty of the task in either hemisphere.(3)The number sense in early childhood is an effective indicator to measure the difference of the first-to third-grade children’s mathematical academic achievement.The number comparison task can explain the difference of the first-to third-grade children’s mathematical academic achievement in different degrees.For first graders,simple tasks can explain the differences in mathematics academic achievement.For second graders,using both simple and difficult tasks can better explain the differences in children’s mathematics academic achievement.For third-graders,the choice of difficult tasks was a good explanation for the differences in mathematics academic achievement.In conclusion,children of different grades show different behavioral characteristics and electrical activity characteristics when processing number sense,and there is a close correlation between number sense and mathematical academic achievement in early childhood,which is an effective indicator to measure the difference in mathematical academic achievement of children from grade one to grade three.According to the electrophysiological characteristics of early number sense development,mathematics educators should pay more attention to the potential role of the right hemisphere in the development of children’s number sense and pay more attention to the development of children’s right hemisphere function in mathematics education,so as to promote the improvement of children’s number sense ability.