Early predictors of math abillities

One of the main goals of the Math Neuroscience and Education Program is to identify children at risk for math learning differences before elementary school. We believe that understanding the root causes of math challenges early in the development will better inform effective interventions.

In order to acomplish this goal, we are going to develop a web-based assessment platform specifically designed to be child-friendly and deployable in large scale. This platoform will host a variety of gamified tasks that have been shown to be robust predictors of math achievement in children (math primitives).

We are also going to include some new experimental tasks that we belive constitute the cognitive start-up tools for human symbolic reasoning (i.e. reading, math, music, programming). One of our hypothesis is that these logical primities will be powerful measures to explain the co-occurences between math and reading challenges.

References

• Number sense in infancy predicts mathematical abilities in childhood
• Numeracy skills in young children as predictors of mathematical competence
• Relations of different types of numerical magnitude representations to each other and to mathematics achievement
• In How Many Ways is the Approximate Number System Associated with Exact Calculation?
• Developmental and Individual Differences in Pure Numerical Estimation
• Preschool language and visuospatial skills respectively predict multiplication and addition/subtraction skills in middle school children
• Severe Developmental Dyscalculia Is Characterized by Core Deficits in Both Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Number Sense
• Perception of geometric sequences and numerosity both predict formal geometric competence in primary school children
• An Extension of the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis from Developmental Language Disorders to Mathematical Disability