The effects and mechanisms of preschoolers' basic cognitive skills on their arithmetic ability and geometry knowledge,China 2020–2021

In this study, we collected data from students in primary and intermediate classes of a kindergarten in Maanshan City, Anhui Province, China,The study was conducted three times,respectively in December 2020 (T1), June 2021 (T2), and December 2021 (T3), through one-on-one administration of a test with the informed consent of the school and the children's parents. In the first administration (T1), participants' quantitative representations, linguistic skills, visual perception, arithmetic ability, geometric knowledge, and nonverbal intelligence were measured, and in the second and third administration (T2 & T3), only participants' arithmetic ability and geometric knowledge were measured, and the measurements remained the same as in the first administration. During the experimental administration, 114 participants completed all rows of the test at T1; a total of 110 participants completed the measurements at T2, with a loss of 4 participants due to leave of absence or absence from school during the administration period; and 110 participants completed the measurements at T3. A total of 110 participants were ultimately included in the analyses, 54 boys and 56 girls, with participants between 3 - 6 years of age at the time of the pre-test (M = 4.30 years, SD = .53).Preprocessing of the data revealed that participant #104's score on the number of dots estimation task at T1 was outside of 5 standard deviations from the mean. Since this participant's scores on all other tasks were at normal levels, it was inferred that the data anomalies may have come from errors in the recording of the data, and therefore participant #104's score on the number of dots estimation task at T1 was excluded. The scores of participants #9 and #99 were also at the extremes (significantly 3 - 4 standard deviations above the mean) at T1 measure of arithmetic ability, but the scores were within the range of normal levels achievable by the children and should not be arbitrarily excluded. The dataset is a format file. Missing data were uniformly identified as 999, and the dataset is in .sav format. MPLUS 8.3 was used for data analysis, and the specific analysis code and data are in the geometry data analysis folder.