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6-year-olds’ different ways of reasoning about a larger collection of items
Jönköping University, School of Education and Communication, HLK, Practice Based Educational Research, Mathematics Education Research.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4685-1594
2023 (English)In: EARLI 2023: Book of abstracts, 2023, p. 125-125Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Sustainable development
00. Sustainable Development, 4. Quality education
Abstract [en]

Children develop an understanding of numbers by, for instance, counting items in smaller or larger sets. When a larger set is placed in a regular arrangement (for example, in rows) subitizing or counting can be used to quantify a subset, and thereby determine the size of the larger set. It becomes more challenging when the items are placed in an irregular arrangement. The aim of this study is to answer the question: How do 6-year-olds estimate and reason about how to determine a quantity of a larger set in an irregular arrangement? In this study, 130 Swedish 6-year-olds were asked: How many cubes do you think there are on the tray? How could you find out? looking at a tray with 47 randomly arranged wooden cubes. In the analysis, students’ answers were summarized. Codes, inductively sprung from the data, were used to describe students’ reasoning. The analysis shows that around half of the students made a reasonable estimation of the number of cubes. In 2/3 of the observations, single-unit counting was in focus in students’ reasoning when determining the size of the set of cubes. Whereas in 1/3 of the observations, decomposing the whole collection into subsets, either of the same size (e.g., groups of five) or different size, was in focus in their reasoning. Hence, the study reveals different ways in which 6-years-olds reason about estimating or determining the size of an uncountable set. Based on this, implications for how to teach quantification and estimation are discussed. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2023. p. 125-125
Keywords [en]
Early Childhood Education, Mathematics/Numeracy, Primary Education, Reasoning
National Category
Pedagogy Mathematics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-62857OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hj-62857DiVA, id: diva2:1810271
Conference
The 20th Biennial EARLI Conference for Research on Learning and Instruction, 22-26 August 2023, Thessaloniki, Greece
Available from: 2023-11-07 Created: 2023-11-07 Last updated: 2024-09-20Bibliographically approved

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Ekdahl, Anna-Lena

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
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Language
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