External number representations are commonly used throughout the first years of instruction. The twenty-frame is a grid that contains two rows of 10 dots each, and within each row, dots are organized in two groups of five. The assumption is that children can make use of these structures for enumerating the dots, rather than relying on one-by-one…

Children's estimation patterns on a number line estimation task may provide information about the mental representation of the magnitude of numbers. Siegler and his colleagues concluded that children's mental representations shift from a logarithmic-ruler representation to a linear-ruler representation. However, there are important methodological…

We examine kindergarten children's emerging social meanings about science as a function of their participation in integrated science inquiry and literacy activities associated with the Scientific Literacy Project (SLP). We describe changes in 123 SLP kindergarten children's narrative accounts of learning science in school during three different…

Based on close observations of two 4-year-old children responding to their parents' requests for quantitative comparisons, we offer a "participationist" account of the origins and development of numerical thinking, one that portrays numbers as a product rather than a pregiven object of human communication. In parallel, we propose a…