Early Education and Development

Home numeracy environment has been related to the development of early numeracy skills. Previous research has shown the relation between dimensions of the home numeracy environment with general or composite measures of numeracy skills, but specific relations between types of activities at home and the early development of specific numeracy skills are under debate. This research aimed to study these specific relations based on two recognized theoretical models in the literature of mathematical cognition: the Home Numeracy Environment and the Informal Numeracy Skills Model. Early numeracy skills were assessed in 189 Chilean prekindergartners (4.6 years on average, SD = 3 months; 50% girls) at the beginning (Time 1) and the end (Time 2) of the school year, while their parents completed a home numeracy environment questionnaire, which included questions about their education, expectations, attitudes, and math activities. Research Findings: Results from hierarchical multivariate multiple regression showed specific relations depending on the testing time point, showing relations at the beginning of the year and after some months of preschool. Parent’s education was positively correlated with all children’s early math skills in both Time 1 and Time 2. Practice or Policy: Educational implications and future research directions are discussed.

Research Findings: While Pictographic characters are often used to support Chinese children’s character learning, little is known about how this facilitates learning. Following the integrated model of symbol semantic categorization, this study examined the effects of Chinese characters’ iconicity on perceptual similarity and semantic consistency judgments among children aged 3.5–6.5 (N = 126, 64 boys). Results showed that perceptual similarity was highest for characters of Dongba script (DBS), followed by characters of Oracle bone script (OBS), and lowest for characters of simplified Chinese (SC). Semantic consistency accuracy was highest for DBS. Meanwhile, children under 58.57 months showed similar accuracy of OBS and SC, while older children performed better with SC. Semantic consistency speed was comparable across all character types for children under 55 months but faster for DBS and SC in older children. These findings suggest that higher iconicity facilitates perceptual similarity and semantic judgments, making characters of SC easier to judge as children age. Practices and Policy: These results indicate that Chinese characters with high iconicity can scaffold young children’s character learning. Educators should introduce characters with varying levels of iconicity based on children’s ages, starting with highly iconic characters and gradually transitioning to less iconic ones.