ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

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Determining the foundational properties of numerical development

Effective Years: 2018-2023

Award Abstract
The goal of this project, led by a team of researchers at the University of Rochester, is to answer important questions about fundamental cognitive capacities underlying number learning. The team will examine abilities assumed by prevailing theories to be universal by studying mathematical learning in the Tsimane', a unique population of farming-foragers. The extreme variability in their exposure to formal education will provide the researchers with an opportunity to evaluate the roles of education, age, maturity, and core cognitive systems in driving early mathematical development. The project will involve multiple methodologies from ethnographic studies of number use in Tsimane' life, to assessments of basic cognitive resources such as working memory, to tests of mathematical knowledge. The team will conduct studies of matched samples of children from 2 to 12 years of age in the US who grow up in impoverished learning environments. The goal is to identify which cognitive components of number competence ought to be targeted by future interventions so as to improve learning in US children living in poverty or who face learning delays. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning.

Many abilities are related to numeracy and number sense, including knowledge of sets, the number words, counting, 1-1 correspondence, spatial relations, and approximate number estimation. Yet, it is not known which of these capacities are the foundations of early number growth and which are the consequence of number acquisition or other cultural factors. This proposal will seek to discover the cognitive underpinnings of number in an indigenous population, the Tsimane'. The key scientifically-relevant features of this population are the extreme variability in their formal educational system -- some children receive no formal education -- and that they progress through the stages of number learning at a protracted timescale, taking 3-4 times as long other children in the locale and children in the United States. Other children have longer, formal education. The high variability in education, age, and parental numeracy in this population will allow many of the components related to number growth to be disentangled as causal factors to an unusual extent. The team will use anthropological methods to document the cultural context and use of number in order to understand what practices support its acquisition and predict children's knowledge. They will also use a series of simple experimental tasks drawn from the mathematics education and cognitive science literatures to assess numerical development and chart the trajectory of Tsimane' number learning in detail. The goal is to develop a unifying computational model of number learning that can be used rapidly to predict which future interventions will be most promising in helping to improve learning in US children, especially those living in disadvantaged learning environments.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.