More Than Just Fun and Games: Promoting Early Math Learning with Numerical Card Play
Authors: Nicole Scalise (presenting author), Emily Daubert, & Geetha Ramani
Contact information:, (707) 318-2428
Affiliation: Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park
Proposal:
Mathematics knowledge lays the foundation for success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, and thus plays a critical role in the education and training of the nation’s next generation of STEM professionals (PCAST, 2012; Sadler & Tai, 2007). Yet even before kindergarten, low-income children underperform on a variety of basic number skills compared to middle-income children (Jordan, Kaplan, Olah, & Locuniak, 2006; Starkey, Klein, & Wakeley, 2004). Moreover, mathematics performance at the start of school predicts long-term mathematics achievement in later grades (Duncan et al., 2007), making early gaps especially concerning.
In response to the trend of an income-based mathematics achievement gap, there is a growing literature on early math interventions (e.g., Clements & Sarama, 2007; Dyson, Jordan, & Glutting, 2013; Ramani & Siegler, 2008; Starkey et al., 2004; Wilson, Dehaene, Dubois, & Fayol, 2009). The present study builds on and extends previous work on play-based training games with low-income preschoolers by using numerical card games to improve participants’ basic math skills. Many low-income children report playing card games at home (Ramani & Siegler, 2008), which suggests numerical card games may be familiar, easily accessible, and relevant to our population of interest. However, to our knowledge, this is the first study to provide an intervention centered solely on card games. Specifically, we examined whether approximately one hour of experience playing the theoretically motivated card games would lead to improvements in participants’ early number knowledge.
A key area of difficulty for low-income preschoolers is their symbolic number knowledge, including number words and symbols (Jordan et al., 2006). Symbolic number knowledge is crucial for school-based mathematics learning like arithmetic, and consequently, a stronger foundation of symbolic number representations may support higher math achievement (Siegler & Lortie-Forgues, 2014). Researchers have proposed that children’s symbolic number representations are directly linked to their non-symbolic number representations (Siegler & Lortie-Forgues, 2014), which allow for nonverbal discrimination between two sets of objects. The present study explored whether a card game intervention could help preschoolers develop their symbolic magnitude comparison skills by building on their underlying non-symbolic magnitude representations with three experiments.
In Experiment 1, Head Start and middle-income preschoolers (n = 24) completed measures of non-symbolic and symbolic magnitude comparison, performing equivalently on non-symbolic magnitude comparison but replicating previous achievement gaps on the parallel measure of symbolic magnitude comparison. In Experiment 2, forty-six Head Start preschoolers were randomly assigned to play either a numerical magnitude comparison card game (“War”) or a numerical matching card game (“Memory”) across four 15-minute sessions with an experimenter. Participants in both conditions improved their rote counting skills, while only the magnitude comparison card game led to significant improvements in participants’ symbolic magnitude comparison skills. Experiment 3 showed that after playing the magnitude comparison card game, low-income participants demonstrated symbolic magnitude comparison skills equivalent to those of a matched sample of middle-income preschoolers. Thus, playing card games that focus on numerical magnitude comparisons may provide a way to reduce the gap in numerical knowledge between preschoolers from lower- and higher-income backgrounds.