The Construction of Abstract Unit Items Tyrone, Scenetra, and Jason

We now turn to the three children who entered the teaching experiment as counters of motor unit items: Tyrone, Scenetra, and Jason. These three children had already reached the figurative stage of their counting scheme at the beginning of the teaching experiment, in that they could count their motor acts as substitutes for countable perceptual or figural items. One of our primary interests at the outset was to study the assimilatory structures of their counting schemes. Although we do not make unwarranted historical extrapolations, if patterns were a prominent feature of the children’s counting activity, we would hypothesize that the patterns had played a role in their development of the figurative stage. This hypothesis would be plausible because of the role patterns played in Brenda’s, Tarus’s, and James’s development.