Numerical thinking: evolution of the cardinal number in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

In this paper we focus on the cardinal aspect of the natural number, where the number is associated with a set to indicate the amount of elements it has. It is about studying how cardinal thinking is in children in pre-school education. Presenting tasks with the logical-mathematical schemes of the cardinal number, and taking into account that each task corresponds to the child's maturational age, we analyze the strategies followed, as well as the mistakes made by those students who have not overcome this task, achieving all this diagnose the numerical thinking in its cardinal aspect.

Keywords

• numerical thinking
• natural number
• cardinal number
• early childhood education