University of Pennsylvania.
Child Dev. 2021 May;92(3):1011-1027. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13470. Epub 2021 Feb 20.
Children struggle with exact, symbolic ratio reasoning, but prior research demonstrates children show surprising intuition when making approximate, nonsymbolic ratio judgments. In the current experiment, eighty-five 6- to 8-year-old children made approximate ratio judgments with dot arrays and numerals. Children were adept at approximate ratio reasoning in both formats and improved with age. Children who engaged in the nonsymbolic task first performed better on the symbolic task compared to children tested in the reverse order, suggesting that nonsymbolic ratio reasoning may function as a scaffold for symbolic ratio reasoning. Nonsymbolic ratio reasoning mediated the relation between children's numerosity comparison performance and symbolic mathematics performance in the domain of probabilities, but numerosity comparison performance explained significant unique variance in general numeration skills.
儿童在精确的、符号的比例推理方面存在困难，但先前的研究表明，儿童在进行近似的、非符号的比例判断时，表现出惊人的直觉。在当前的实验中，85 名 6 至 8 岁的儿童使用点数组和数字进行近似比例判断。儿童在两种形式上都擅长于近似比例推理，并随着年龄的增长而提高。先进行非符号任务的儿童在符号任务上的表现优于按相反顺序测试的儿童，这表明非符号比例推理可能作为符号比例推理的支架。非符号比例推理在概率领域中，调节了儿童数量比较表现与符号数学表现之间的关系，但数量比较表现解释了一般计数技能中显著的独特方差。
