The Relationship Between Children's Approximate Number Certainty and Symbolic Mathematics

Why do some children excel in mathematics while others struggle? A large body of work has shown positive correlations between children’s Approximate Number System (ANS) and school-taught symbolic mathematical skills, but the mechanism explaining this link remains unknown. One potential mediator of this relationship might be children’s numerical metacognition: children’s ability to evaluate how sure or unsure they are in understanding and manipulating numbers. While previous work has shown that children’s math abilities are uniquely predicted by symbolic numerical metacognition, we focus on the extent to which children’s non-symbolic/ANS numerical metacognition, in particular sensitivity to certainty, might be predictive of math ability, and might mediate the relationship between the ANS and symbolic math. A total of 72 children aged 4–6 years completed measures of ANS precision, ANS metacognition sensitivity, and the Test of Early Mathematical Ability (TEMA-3). Our results replicate many established findings in the literature, including the correlation between ANS precision and the TEMA-3, particularly on the Informal subtype questions. However, we did not find that ANS metacognition sensitivity was related to TEMA-3 performance, nor that it mediated the relationship between the ANS and the TEMA-3. These findings suggest either that metacognitive calibration may play a larger role than metacognitive sensitivity, or that metacognitive differences in the non-symbolic number perception do not robustly contribute to symbolic math performance.
Published paper (open access) here: https://jnc.psychopen.eu/article/view/220

为何部分儿童在数学领域表现出色，而另一些儿童却感到挑战重重？众多研究成果揭示了儿童的大致数字系统（ANS）与学校教授的符号数学技能之间存在正相关关系，然而解释这一关联的机制仍不明确。该关系的一种潜在中介因素可能是儿童的数字元认知：儿童评估自己对理解和操作数字的确定性或不确定性的能力。尽管先前的研究表明儿童的数学能力可由符号数字元认知独特预测，但我们专注于探讨儿童的非符号/ANS数字元认知，尤其是对确定性的敏感性，可能对数学能力有何预测作用，以及可能调节ANS与符号数学之间的关系。共有72名4至6岁的儿童完成了ANS精确度、ANS元认知敏感性以及早期数学能力测试（TEMA-3）的测量。我们的结果复制了许多文献中的既定发现，包括ANS精确度与TEMA-3的相关性，尤其是在非正式子类问题中。然而，我们没有发现ANS元认知敏感性与TEMA-3表现相关，也没有发现它调节了ANS与TEMA-3之间的关系。这些发现表明，元认知校准可能比元认知敏感性发挥更大的作用，或者非符号数字感知中的元认知差异并未稳固地促进符号数学表现。

已发表论文（开放获取）见：https://jnc.psychopen.eu/article/view/220