Teaching number-word equivalences: a study of transfer

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Special Education
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Children with intellectual disabilities and typically developing preschoolers often struggle with recognizing printed number words.
• Early number word recognition is crucial for mathematical development.
• Existing research highlights challenges in bridging auditory and visual number word processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if auditory-receptive training of number words facilitates generalization to visual tasks in children with and without intellectual disabilities.
• To assess the impact of auditory-receptive learning on matching printed number words to numerals and sets.
• To evaluate improvements in naming printed number words following auditory training.

Main Methods:

• Participants included four nonretarded preschool children and three retarded children, all with basic counting and numeral skills but poor printed number word recognition.
• Training focused on an auditory-receptive task involving number words.
• Performance was assessed on tasks involving matching printed number words to numerals, printed number words to sets, and naming printed number words.

Main Results:

• All participating children demonstrated significant improvement in recognizing and naming printed number words after auditory-receptive training.
• Generalization occurred across different visual tasks, including matching number words to numerals and sets.
• The auditory-receptive approach proved effective for both groups of children.

Conclusions:

• Auditory-receptive learning is an effective strategy for teaching printed number words to children with and without intellectual disabilities.
• This method supports the generalization of number word recognition to various visual-perceptual tasks.
• Findings suggest that targeting auditory processing can enhance early literacy skills in mathematics.