CAREER: Understanding and Facilitating Numerical Discriminations in Infancy

职业：理解和促进婴儿期的数字歧视

• 批准号: 1056726
• 负责人: Sara Cordes
• 金额: $ 49.06万
• 依托单位: Boston College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-15 至 2017-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1056726&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Understanding; Facilitating; Numerical; Discriminations

Infants are sensitive to numerical information in the world around them, and evidence suggests that the ease with which they discriminate the number of items in a set may be correlated with later achievements in mathematics in the classroom setting. While much work has been dedicated to identifying simple and effective means for targeting math skills in school-aged children, no work has identified similar interventions for enhancing numerical abilities in infancy. Can infants be taught to attend to number? If so, does this training have lasting effects? The first goal of this project is to validate simple and inexpensive methods for facilitating numerical discriminations in preverbal infants, long before mathematics difficulties may be encountered in the classroom. The second goal of the project is to clarify how it is infants and young children make the connection between these preverbal representations of number and verbal count words. Many studies have focused on examining the acquisition of verbal counting in preschoolers, however few, if any have examined the receptive language end of this question -- namely, at what point do infants understand that words can refer to numbers? What factors facilitate and/or hinder their ability to form the mapping between words and numerosities? By exploring the relationship between language and number in preverbal infants, this project will provide a foundational understanding of exactly what conceptual knowledge young children bring to the table when learning to count. The educational and research integration plan of the project involves a three-pronged approach of (1) graduate and undergraduate training in developmental research, including the initiation of a summer internship program for students at undergraduate institutions with limited research opportunities, (2) the development of a new undergraduate research-based course on infancy, and (3) the creation of a free annual lecture series for parents in the greater Boston area interested in learning about infant cognition, with the goal of helping parents become better consumers of scientific information and of infant-oriented marketed products. Combined, this project has the potential to impact education both at Boston College and throughout the Boston community, to inform our understanding of the mapping between preverbal with verbal representations of number, and to identify effective interventions to enhance the preverbal foundations of mathematics that can be implemented at a much earlier age and across the socioeconomic spectrum.

婴儿对周围世界的数字信息很敏感，有证据表明，他们区分一组物品数量的容易程度可能与后来在课堂上的数学成就有关。虽然已经有很多工作致力于确定针对学龄儿童数学技能的简单有效的方法，但没有工作确定类似的干预措施来提高婴儿的数学能力。能教婴儿注意数字吗？如果有，这种训练有持久的效果吗？该项目的第一个目标是验证简单而廉价的方法，以促进学龄前婴儿的数字辨别，早在课堂上可能遇到数学困难之前。该项目的第二个目标是阐明婴儿和幼儿是如何将数字的言语前表征和言语计数词联系起来的。许多研究都集中在检查学龄前儿童语言计数的习得上，然而，如果有的话，很少有研究过这个问题的接受性语言——也就是说，婴儿在什么时候能理解单词可以指数字？什么因素促进和/或阻碍他们形成单词和数字之间映射的能力？通过探索语言前婴儿的语言和数字之间的关系，该项目将为幼儿在学习数数时带来的概念知识提供基础理解。该项目的教育和研究整合计划包括三个方面：(1)发展研究方面的研究生和本科生培训，包括为研究机会有限的本科院校的学生启动暑期实习计划；(2)开发一门新的以婴儿为基础的本科研究课程；(3)为大波士顿地区有兴趣学习婴儿认知的父母创建一个免费的年度系列讲座，目的是帮助父母成为科学信息和面向婴儿的市场产品的更好消费者。综合起来，这个项目有可能影响波士顿学院和整个波士顿社区的教育，让我们了解数字的言语表达和言语表达之间的映射，并确定有效的干预措施，以增强数学的言语基础，这些基础可以在更早的年龄和整个社会经济范围内实施。