Spontaneous focusing on quantitative relations: Towards a characterisation

In contrast to previous studies on Spontaneous Focusing On quantitative Relations (SFOR), the present study not only investigated the extent to which children focus on (multiplicative) quantitative relations, but also the nature of children’s quantitative focus (i.e., the types of quantitative relations that children focus on). Therefore, we offered three different SFOR tasks – a multiplicative, additive, or open SFOR task – to 315 second, fourth and sixth graders. Results revealed, first, that most children spontaneously focused on quantitative relations. Some focused on multiplicative relations, others on additive relations. Second, SFOR, and especially multiplicative SFOR, increased with grade, while the development of additive SFOR differed between tasks. Third, the open SFOR task seemed best suited to capture SFOR, since it evoked the largest number of each type of relational answers − while still showing substantial inter-individual differences in SFOR. These results indicate that a broader conceptualization and operationalisation of SFOR than the unilateral multiplicative one is warranted.status: publishe