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Icon arrays help younger children's proportional reasoning
Azzurra Ruggeri1,2, Laurianne Vagharchakian3, Fei Xu4
1MPRG iSearch|Information Search, Ecological and Active Learning Research With Children, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
The British Journal of Developmental Psychology
|January 23, 2018
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Mathematical Cognition
Background:
- Proportional reasoning accuracy improves with age.
- Icon arrays can aid reasoning, particularly for adults with lower numeracy.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine how presentation format (icon arrays vs. numerical frequencies) and time constraints affect proportional reasoning in children and adults.
- To understand developmental differences in proportional reasoning strategies.
Main Methods:
- Participants (7-year-olds, 10-year-olds, adults) judged likelihood of drawing gold tokens from sets with varying proportions.
- Context variables included icon array or numerical frequency presentation and limited or unlimited time.
Main Results:
- Performance was better under unlimited time conditions for all age groups.
- Younger children showed improved accuracy with icon arrays.
- Older children and adults performed similarly across presentation formats.
Conclusions:
- Time availability significantly enhances proportional reasoning accuracy.
- Icon arrays are particularly beneficial for younger children's proportional reasoning.
- Proportional reasoning is linked to working memory, number sense, and subitizing skills.