Child’s Understanding of Number

The publication of this book may mark a sea change in the way that we think about cognitive development. For the past two decades, the emphasis has been on young children’s limitations… Now a new trend is emerging: to challenge the original assumption of young children’s cognitive incapacity. The Child’s Understanding of Number represents the most original and provocative manifestation to date of this new trend.

• 1. Focus on the Preschooler 2. Training Studies Reconsidered 3. More Capacity Than Meets the Eye: Direct Evidence 4. Number Concepts in the Preschooler? 5. What Numerosities Can the Young Child Represent? 6. How Do Young Children Obtain Their Representations of Numerosity? 7. The Counting Model 8. The Development of the How-To-Count Principles 9. The Abstraction and Order-Irrelevance Counting Principles 10. Reasoning about Number 11. Formal Arithmetic and the Young Child's Understanding of Number 12. What Develops and How Conclusions References Index