Emergent proportional reasoning: Searching for early traces in four- to five-year olds

More and more research suggests that proportional reasoning emerges already at a very early age in childhood. The present study aimed to investigate these abilities in four- to five-year-old children. A five-item proportional reasoning task involving discrete quantities was administered in 389 children. On average children could solve about one item correctly. An error analysis allowed to identify five answer profiles, showing that four- to five-year olds already systematically and meaningfully attempt to make sense of one-to-many and many-to-many correspondences. Our findings advocate for the presence of precursors of the one-to-many correspondence notion in most four- to five-year-old children.status: Published onlin