Publications

Perceptual subitizing is a pivotal skill in children’s mathematical development. It is defined as the rapid identification of small numerosities. Previous studies pointed to the contribution of visual features of sets to perceptual subitizing performance in adults. Insights into the contribution of visual features to subitizing performance in the critical 3- to 4-year age range are scant. This study aimed to address this gap by investigating the ...

This 5-year longitudinal study examined whether high mathematics achievers in primary school had cognitive advantages before entering formal education. High mathematics achievement was defined as performing above Pc 90 in Grades 1 and 3. The predominantly White sample (Mage in preschool: 64 months) included 31 high achievers (12 girls) and 114 average achievers (63 girls). We measured children's early numerical abilities, complex mathematical ...

Research interest in the potential of educational technology to support young children as they learn to read has significantly increased during the last decades. These studies typically adopt a media comparison approach (comparing learning with one instructional medium vs. another instructional medium) or a value-added approach (comparing learning with a standard version vs. one with an added feature). We aimed to systematically review both ...

Rational numbers, such as fractions and decimals, are harder to understand than natural numbers. Moreover, individuals struggle with fractions more than with decimals. The present study sought to disentangle the extent to which two potential sources of difficulty affect secondary-school students’ numerical magnitude understanding: number type (natural vs. rational) and structure of the notation system (place-value-based vs. ...

High-quality instruction in preschool is important for children’s mathematical development. To date, the domain-specific elements constituting mathematics instruction quality and the factors associated with this quality are hardly studied, resulting in serious gaps in our insights into the topic. We aimed to address this gap by investigating (a) 43 preschool teachers’ mathematical questioning behavior during shared picture book reading, and (b) ...

In this article we review the research on the flexible or adaptive use of solution strategies in school mathematics, with a focus on the most recent work in the field. After a short introduction, we provide an overview of the various ways in which strategy flexibility has been conceptualized and investigated in the research literature. Then we review the research that has looked at the relationship between strategy flexibility and task ...