Dept of Mathematics Education seminar: 13 March 2024

40 mins Presentation + 20 mins Q&A: Dr Jo Van Hoof

Unravelling the role of children’s ordinality skills and tendencies in the crucial years of their numerical development

(KU Leuven, Belgium) [jo.vanhoof@kuleuven.be]

Abstract

There are two crucial properties of numbers that are essential for children’s early numeracy development: cardinality and ordinality. While children’s cardinality skills have received lots of research attention and the development is well-understood, the processes underlying numerical ordering and the development of children’s numerical ordering are much less clear. Moreover, recent research focused on children’s tendency to spontaneously (i.e., self-initiated) focus on exact numerosities (SFON) in everyday situations. Ample research highlighted its crucial role in children’s mathematics development. However, research on the tendency to spontaneously focus on numerical order (SFONO) is scarce.

In this talk, I will summarize what my colleagues from the university of Turku and me have been doing in the FONO project (Focusing On Numerical Order). Based on the existing literature, we developed new SFONO tasks. Tester-child interaction took place in the context of a large battery of activities allowing observation of children’s different ways of using numerical order, in guided and spontaneous situations. Based on qualitative data from a case study (3 children) and cross-sectional and longitudinal data from of a large group of kindergartners (n=150), the main aim of the project is to shed light on the development of children’s numerical ordering skills and how these are related to other basic numerical skills, such as counting and cardinality understanding.

40 mins Presentation + 20 mins Q&A: Prof. Matthew Inglis

Empirical evidence for the dialogic account

(Loughborough) [M.J.Inglis@lboro.ac.uk]

Abstract

Catarina Dutilh Novaes recently won the 2022 Lakatos Prize (which honours work published in the Philosophy of Science) for her book The Dialogical Roots of Deduction. In this talk I present a version of her dialogical account and reinterpret some of the empirical work I have conducted in my career in terms of her theoretical ideas. I will argue that conceptualising mathematical reasoning as a dialogical process has interesting implications for mathematics education research and practice.