Young children intuitively organize numbers on straight, horizontal lines from left to right before the onset of formal instruction.

The number line estimation task is frequently used to measure children's numerical magnitude understanding. It is unclear whether the resulting straight, horizontal, left-to-right-oriented estimate patterns indicate task constraints or children's intuitive number-space mapping. Three- to six-year-old children (N = 72, Mage = 4.89, 56% girls, 94% German citizenship) were asked to explain the meaning of numbers to a teddy by laying out a rope and attaching cards showing non-symbolic numerosities (dots) to it. Most children intuitively created straight, horizontal, and left-to-right-oriented representations. Characteristics of the line correlated with age, mathematical competencies, and home numeracy. This demonstrates the usefulness of the number line estimation task for assessing how children intuitively map numbers onto space.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Child Development

• Publication date

  2023-09-30

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Education, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/cdev.14016PMID 37776095
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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