Spontaneous Focusing on Quantitative Relations: Towards a Characterization

ABSTRACT In contrast to previous studies on Spontaneous Focusing on Quantitative Relations (SFOR), the present study investigated not only the extent to which children focus on (multiplicative) quantitative relations, but also the nature of children’s quantitative focus (i.e., the types of quantitative relations that children focus on). Therefore, we offered three different SFOR tasks – a multiplicative, additive, or open SFOR task – to 315 second, fourth, and sixth graders. Results revealed, first, that most children spontaneously focused on quantitative relations. Some focused on multiplicative relations, and others on additive relations. Second, SFOR, and especially multiplicative SFOR, increased with grade, while the development of additive SFOR differed between tasks. Third, the open SFOR task seemed best suited to capture SFOR, since it evoked the largest number of each type of relational answers − while still showing substantial interindividual differences in SFOR. These results indicate that a broader conceptualization and operationalization of SFOR than the unilateral multiplicative one are warranted.

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