Competence in number is essential if an individual is to participate fully in society. Students with effective number skills achieve not only in mathematics but also in other areas of learning. Learning number is not simply the task of memorising facts or procedures. Rather, for each student, learning number demands a progression of increasing conceptual sophistication, along with the development of a rich network of number relationships. Supporting most students to effectively learn number requires responsive, targeted enquiry-based instruction over a number of years of schooling. The Learning Framework in Number (LFIN, Wright & Elemor-Collins, 2018) and corresponding suite of tools are designed to enable such responsive instruction.
Numeracy encompasses the knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions that students need to use mathematics in a wide range of situations. It involves students recognising and understanding the role of mathematics in the world and having the dispositions and capacities to use mathematical knowledge and skills purposefully.
When teachers identify numeracy demands across the curriculum, students have opportunities to transfer their mathematical knowledge and skills to contexts outside the mathematics classroom. These opportunities help students recognise the interconnected nature of mathematical knowledge, other learning areas and the wider world, and encourage them to use their mathematical skills more broadly.
During the early childhood period, young children’s language skills are growing rapidly, and children’s developing language underlies both reading and number related skill development. The relation between language development and early literacy has been well documented (Cooper, Roth, Speece, & Schatschneider, 2002), and we are now beginning to understand more about how language input influences early number sense.
For example, for counting or identifying numbers children must have a verbal representation, or words for numbers. A growing body of research supports a relation between general language skills, particularly vocabulary, and early numeracy skills. General vocabulary knowledge, for example, is related to number-word knowledge in children as young as two years old (Negen & Sarnecka, 2012). Children’s ability to define specific words has been associated with a range of numeracy skills in early schooling years (Foster, Anthony, Clements, & Sarama, 2015; Purpura, Schmitt, & Ganley, 2017) and in preschool (Purpura & Napoli, 2015). In fact, language skills have been associated with differences between children for nearly all early numeracy skills (Purpura & Ganley, 2014).
Early literacy and numeracy skills are critical for early school success (Missall, Mercer, Martinez, & Casebeer, 2012; Morgan, Farkas, & Wu, 2011) and these two skill areas appear to be related to one another. For example, young children with delays in reading skill development are often delayed in early math skills as well (Krajewski & Schneider, 2009). Plus, there is a growing body of evidence that both early literacy and early numeracy skills are strong predictors of children’s long-term achievement (Duncan et al., 2007; Watts, Duncan, Siegler, & Davis-Kean, 2014), with early numeracy emerging as the strongest predictor of later success.
We typically think of early literacy and numeracy skills as separate areas of development. Generally, we assess these skills using different tasks, and we use different instructional activities to promote skill acquisition in these areas. However, research suggests that there are important cognitive connections between early literacy and numeracy skill development that may help us to think more broadly about children’s early academic learning. Ultimately, we can use this information to create rich environments that support both early literacy and numeracy skill development.
Researchers are beginning to explore the relation between specific skills in these two domains. Skills frequently targeted in early literacy activities, such as knowing letter names and sounds, rhyming, and knowledge of print concepts, have connections with specific early numeracy skills. For example, in one study, letter and number naming were found to be highly related in preschool (Piasta, Purpura, & Wagner, 2010). In another study, general print knowledge, including letter and sound identification, was shown to be uniquely related to early numeracy skills one year later (Purpura, Hume, Sims, & Lonigan, 2011). Letter knowledge also predicted children’s ability to subtract and add in a story context, while rhyming ability predicted subtraction and addition with concrete materials (Davidse, Jong, & Bus, 2014).
Although the specific skills investigated varied, the overall conclusion is that early literacy and numeracy are influenced by some of the same broader cognitive skills, and, more specifically, through children’s developing language.
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