Fostering Preschoolers' Understanding of the Addition -Subtraction Inverse Principle

90 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.The present research involved gauging preschooler's learning potential for a key arithmetic concept, the addition-subtraction inverse principle (e.g., 2 + 1 - 1 = 2). Twenty-four 4 to 5 years old Taiwanese children from two public preschools serving low- and middle-income families participated in the training experiment. Half were randomly assigned to an experimental group; half, to a control condition. Participants were tested for an understanding of inversion before and after the interventions. Almost one third of the 5 year olds from both groups performed at the marginally or reliably successful levels before the intervention, and almost three quarters of them did so after the intervention. None of the 4 year olds were successful before the intervention and few benefited from the intervention. The intervention significantly enhanced the understanding of the inverse principle at both levels of SES.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD