Math ability is critical to children's future school and career success, and prior studies show that flexible attention to magnitudes (FAM) predicts children's future math abilities over and above other early math skills. FAM broadly refers to the ability to switch flexibly between attending to different dimensions of magnitude (e.g., size and numerosity). In the current study, we created an intervention using number books to test, for the first time, the malleability of children's FAM ability. A randomized experiment was conducted with 116 preschool-age children (Mage = 55.6 months; 54.3 % female) to test our hypothesis that FAM ability is malleable and can be trained using number books. The intervention included four conditions to which children were randomly assigned: size-to-number, mixed, conventional counting, and non-numerical. The experimental conditions were size-to-number and mixed, while the conventional counting and non-numerical conditions served as controls. Consistent with our hypothesis, children significantly improved in FAM task performance from pre- to post-intervention within the experimental groups, but not within the control groups. Furthermore, children in the two experimental conditions combined significantly improved number line estimation scores from pre- to post-intervention, unlike the combined two control conditions. Implications of these findings on the development of future FAM interventions are discussed.

中文翻译：

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检查幼儿对数字和空间大小的灵活注意力的可塑性


数学能力对于儿童未来的学业和职业成功至关重要，之前的研究表明，对数量的灵活关注 (FAM) 可以预测儿童未来的数学能力，超越其他早期数学技能。 FAM 广义上是指在关注不同量级（例如大小和数量）之间灵活切换的能力。在当前的研究中，我们首次使用数字簿创建了一种干预措施来测试儿童 FAM 能力的可塑性。对 116 名学龄前儿童（Mage = 55.6 个月；54.3% 女性）进行了一项随机实验，以检验我们的假设，即 FAM 能力具有可塑性，并且可以使用数字书进行训练。干预措施包括将儿童随机分配到四种情况：大小到数字、混合、传统计数和非数字。实验条件为大小与数字混合，而常规计数和非数字条件作为对照。与我们的假设一致，实验组中的儿童在 FAM 任务表现上从干预前到干预后都有显着改善，但在对照组中则没有。此外，与组合的两种对照条件不同，两种实验条件下的儿童​​从干预前到干预后显着提高了数线估计分数。讨论了这些发现对未来 FAM 干预措施发展的影响。