Supporting the development of numerical cognition in preschool children: tablet-based vs. paper-pencil training.
Résumé
The importance of early mathematical skills has been widely demonstrated by their impact on academic achievement (Duncan et al., 2007), and career success (Romano et al., 2010). Many tablet applications have been developed to support children’s cognitive development, but their adoption for early math education remains controversial. The present comparative study examines different mathematics trainings for preschoolers to identify those that best support the development of mathematical skills. One hundred sixty-one French preschoolers (aged 4 and 5 years) were randomly assigned to one of three training groups: one used a tablet for visuospatial training (n=53), one used a tablet for pre-mathematic training (n=52), and the last one used a paper-pencil format for pre-mathematic training (n=56). The training lasted 8 weeks (2 sessions of 20 minutes a week). All participants underwent pre- and post-training assessment of their basic cognitive and numerical processing ability (visuospatial skills, short-term memory, motor rapidity, counting, symbolic/non-symbolic magnitude estimation, symbol-to-numerosity mapping, ordinality, and simple arithmetic). The repeated measures ANOVA showed that visuospatial skills were selectively enhanced by tablet-based visuospatial training (F(2,155)=3.468, p=.034), whereas single-digit number comparison acuity was selectively promoted by pre-mathematical training regardless of its format (F(2,155)=3.76, p=.026, post-hoc ptukey<.001 for the tablet-based pre-math training group, and ptukey=.033 for the paper-pencil pre-math training group) only for 4-year-old children but not for 5-year-old children. The results suggest that specific training is needed to develop different domains of preschooler’s numerical cognition, and that it is premature to confirm a specific benefit of tablet use for this age group.