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What is the foundational knowledge that children rely on to provide meaning as they construct an exact symbolic number system? People and animals can quickly and accurately distinguish small exact quantities (i.e., 1 to 3). One possibility is that children's ability to map small quantities to spoken number words supports their developing exact number system. To test this hypothesis, it is important to have valid and reliable measures of the efficiency of quantity-number word mapping. In the present study, we explored the reliability and validity of a measure for assessing the efficiency of mapping between small quantities and number words--speeded naming of quantity. Study 1 (N = 128) with 5- and 6-year-old children and Study 2 (N = 182) with 3- and 4-year-old children show that the speeded naming of quantities is a simple and reliable measure that is correlated with individual differences in children's developing numeracy knowledge. This measure could provide a useful tool for testing comprehensive theories of how children develop their symbolic number representations.

The present study aims to investigate the relationship between pre-service science teachers' argumentation skills and cognitive flexibility levels. Within the scope of the study, an argumentation-based science laboratory application was applied to first year science teaching students for 4 weeks. The arguments were assessed by eight faculty members and doctoral students. The Argumentation Assessment Rubric (Choi, 2008) was used to assess the quality of the written arguments. The quality of the arguments and descriptions used by the students in the reports were evaluated as total writing scores. The "Cognitive Flexibility Inventory" developed by Dennis and Vander Wal (2010) was employed to assess the cognitive flexibility levels of pre-service teachers. Simple Correlation analysis and Simple Linear Regression analysis methods were used to determine the relationship between the sub-dimensions of cognitive flexibility inventory and argumentation skills of pre-service science teachers and the effect of cognitive flexibility levels on argumentation skills. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between pre-service teachers' cognitive flexibility levels and argumentation skills.

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between science teacher candidates’ ability to construct an argument and learning approaches. For this purpose, the “Learning Approach Scale” was applied to Inonu University Educational Faculty Science teachers ‘first grade students’, and the results were compared with the arguments which were created by the same students. The findings shows that there is a significant relationship between their argument create skills and learning approaches.

Research Findings: Children who speak English are slower to learn the counting sequence between 11 and 20 compared to children who speak Asian languages. In the present research, we examined whether providing children with spatially relevant information during counting would facilitate their acquisition of the counting sequence. Three-year-olds (n = 54) who played a 1-20 number board game in which numbers were grouped by decade into 2 rows learned significantly more of the counting sequence than children who played a linear version of the game or those who were in the control group. Both the row and linear versions of the game helped children improve their performance on an object counting task. Children's performance on a number line task did not show an effect of either game intervention. Practice or Policy: These results suggest that counting practice that includes spatially informative cues can facilitate young English-speaking children's learning of the challenging number sequence from 11 to 20.