CAREER: Early Number-Concept Development in Low-Income English-Language Learners: Observation and Intervention

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The project, conducted by investigators from the University of California at Irvine, is an observation and intervention study of number-concept development in 3- to 4-year-old children, controlling for income and language status. Several lines of research have shown that children's number estimation acuity at the age of 3 years and their understanding of cardinal numbers when they enter kindergarten both predict performance on standardized mathematics tests many years thereafter.The observation component will assess 260 children at ages 3 and 4 years and will be the first comprehensive, baseline description of the number knowledge of low-income English Language Learner (ELL) preschoolers. By assessing children in both Spanish and English, this study will separately describe (a) the children's knowledge of number concepts, and (b) the degree to which this knowledge can be expressed in English. Three comparison groups will also be tested: low-income English monolinguals, middle-income English monolinguals, and middle income Spanish/English simultaneous bilinguals. The children will be tested in 2 sessions, 6 months apart, on 10 measures that include such variables as receptive vocabulary in English and the home language, approximate number system (ANS) acuity, knowledge of the linguistic number systems of English and the home language, family demographic information, and attentional control. The intervention component will focus on 160 children from low-income households where Spanish is spoken. Three-year-olds will be randomly assigned to either a treatment or control group. The intervention has previously been shown to improve English monolingual children's knowledge of the linguistic number system and may also help children map preverbal approximate number representations to number words. It is hoped that the observation and intervention studies can lead to similar gains in this vulnerable and understudied ELL population.