Early Mathematical Literacy

Felicia Hurewitz

Converging research suggests that children bring “intuitive,” domain-specific knowledge of verbal counting, addition, and subtraction to their schooling (see Gelman & Gallistel 1978; Gelman & Cordes, 2001). Acquiring elementary math skills involves making a mapping between these early representations and the spoken and written formal numerical system. A child’s eventual skills in school-based mathematics will be influenced by the automaticity of this low-level mapping process. This research project examines two crucial junctures in the acquisition of automaticity in early mathematical understanding: the mapping between spoken number words and numerical representations (i.e. learning the count list), and the mapping between orthographic representations and numerical representations (i.e. mathematical literacy). In the latter case we particularly focus on special populations: those children who are designated by the school system as delayed in mathematical achievement (children who potentially have dyscalculia) and those that are accelerated in mathematics as compared to their age-matched peers. Children are tested using procedures that register timed responses to spoken or written numerals, or to countable objects. Our hypothesis is that some of the children who are failing to achieve grade-level performance in math are impaired at making nonverbal quantity judgments, demonstrating a specific deficit in quantitative reasoning. The purpose of the research is to facilitate early identification of those children who are at risk for dyscalculia, and to potentially distinguish domain-specific numerical impairments from other factors that may hinder achievement in mathematics.

About Felicia Hurewitz

Felicia Hurewitz received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 under the supervision of Lila Gleitman. Her dissertation examined the mechanisms young children use to resolve linguistic ambiguities during online sentence processing. While at Penn, she was associated with the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, receiving both predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the institute. Subsequently, Dr Hurewitz has turned her attention to the early development of mathematical abilities. In her current position at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, Dr. Hurewitz collaborates with Rochel Gelman on a variety of projects that explore the architecture of numerical and nonnumerical quantity representations in children.