ENCOURAGING CHILDREN TO COUNT

Preschool and infant-school children are often claimed to learn about number from their experiences of counting but several studies show they neither count to answer questions about number nor rely on information from counting if it conflicts with other strategies. Explanations of children's failure to count arc reviewed and two studies comparing methods of encouraging children to count are reported. Yemeni children aged between 5 and 8 years and English children aged between 3 and 5 years were all encouraged to count by methods which emphasized that counting yielded the right relative number judgement and that it yielded the same judgement as matching. The older children also showed a very marked improvement in their judgements. These results suggest that children do not count either because they do not know how much better counting is than other strategies for comparing number or because they are not confident that they can use counting to derive accurate judgements.