Research Unit Brain & Cognition, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Kulak, Kortrijk, Belgium.
Dev Sci. 2018 Sep;21(5):e12653. doi: 10.1111/desc.12653. Epub 2018 Feb 7.
Digit comparison is strongly related to individual differences in children's arithmetic ability. Why this is the case, however, remains unclear to date. Therefore, we investigated the relative contribution of three possible cognitive mechanisms in first and second graders' digit comparison performance: digit identification, digit-number word matching and digit ordering ability. Furthermore, we examined whether these components could account for the well-established relation between digit comparison performance and arithmetic. As expected, all candidate predictors were related to digit comparison in both age groups. Moreover, in first graders, digit ordering and in second graders both digit identification and digit ordering explained unique variance in digit comparison performance. However, when entering these unique predictors of digit comparison into a mediation model with digit comparison as predictor and arithmetic as outcome, we observed that whereas in second graders digit ordering was a full mediator, in first graders this was not the case. For them, the reverse was true and digit comparison fully mediated the relation between digit ordering and arithmetic. These results suggest that between first and second grade, there is a shift in the predictive value for arithmetic from cardinal processing and procedural knowledge to ordinal processing and retrieving declarative knowledge from memory; a process which is possibly due to a change in arithmetic strategies at that age. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/dDB0IGi2Hf8.
数字比较与儿童算术能力的个体差异密切相关。然而，到目前为止，原因尚不清楚。因此，我们研究了在一年级和二年级学生的数字比较表现中，三种可能的认知机制（数字识别、数字-数字词匹配和数字排序能力）的相对贡献。此外，我们还研究了这些成分是否可以解释数字比较表现与算术之间的既定关系。正如预期的那样，所有候选预测因子在两个年龄组中都与数字比较相关。此外，在一年级，数字排序，以及在二年级，数字识别和数字排序都解释了数字比较表现的独特差异。然而，当将这些数字比较的独特预测因子输入到一个以数字比较为预测因子、算术为结果的中介模型中时，我们观察到，在二年级，数字排序是完全的中介因素，而在一年级则并非如此。对于他们来说，情况正好相反，数字比较完全中介了数字排序和算术之间的关系。这些结果表明，从一年级到二年级，算术的预测值从基数处理和程序性知识转变为顺序处理和从记忆中检索陈述性知识；这一过程可能是由于那个年龄段的算术策略发生了变化。本文的视频摘要可以在以下网址观看：https://youtu.be/dDB0IGi2Hf8。
