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Scholify essay developmental, maths debate

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While some researchers claim that infants have an innate ability to discriminate numbers and perform simple math, this view is debated. Tests show that infants under 14-16 months struggle with basic less than/greater than judgments, suggesting their poor understanding of numeracy. Methods used to argue infants can distinguish numbers have received criticism for not controlling for non-numerical elements like total area or amount that infants could be responding to rather than number itself. More research is needed to understand infants' early number skills.

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Debate: Arguing against ‘Do human infants have an ability to discriminate number and to add and subtract simple numbers?’ Many researchers have claimed that young infants have knowledge of number. This conclusion has arisen from tasks such as infants showing dishabituation to events occurring at different numbers of times to habituated events, for example showing three compared to two dots. This conclusion is rather surprising, as tests of infant’s numeracy skills show very poor understanding. For example, Cooper (1984) demonstrated that children under 14 to 16 months cannot make even simple less-than- or-more-than judgements. It is to be expected, then, that the methods that have lead to these conclusions have received much criticism of their reliability. It has been proven that infants are probably dishabituating to non-numerical elements of the stimuli presented to them, such as the amount of black on the page, or area taken up by the display. For example, Clearfield and Mix (2001) habituated infants to a set of dots, before showing the same amount of dots taking up a larger area, or more dots covering the original area size. The infants looked longer at the first condition than the second. For more, visit www.scholify.com

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Scholify essay developmental, maths debate

  • 1. Debate: Arguing against ‘Do human infants have an ability to discriminate number and to add and subtract simple numbers?’ Many researchers have claimed that young infants have knowledge of number. This conclusion has arisen from tasks such as infants showing dishabituation to events occurring at different numbers of times to habituated events, for example showing three compared to two dots. This conclusion is rather surprising, as tests of infant’s numeracy skills show very poor understanding. For example, Cooper (1984) demonstrated that children under 14 to 16 months cannot make even simple less-than- or-more-than judgements. It is to be expected, then, that the methods that have lead to these conclusions have received much criticism of their reliability. It has been proven that infants are probably dishabituating to non-numerical elements of the stimuli presented to them, such as the amount of black on the page, or area taken up by the display. For example, Clearfield and Mix (2001) habituated infants to a set of dots, before showing the same amount of dots taking up a larger area, or more dots covering the original area size. The infants looked longer at the first condition than the second. For more, visit www.scholify.com