The Relation between Two Strategies of Cardinal Number: Correspondence and Counting

RUSSAc, R. J. The Relation between Two Strategies of Cardinal Number: Correspondence and Counting. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 728-735. 60 kindergarten, first-grade, and secondgrade children were required to construct numerically equivalent collections and to determine asymmetric-transitive relations among nonequivalent collections, using two strategies of cardinal number: and counting. A novel correspondence task was also introduced and compared with a standard conservation of number procedure. Equivalency by collinear was significantly more difficult than number conservation. This was seen to indicate that the ability to conserve number is but an intermediate step in the development of quantitative correspondence. Children were able to apply a counting strategy to comparisons of small equivalent and nonequivalent collections prior to making the same comparisons by correspondence. There was little indication that children in this study understood the principle of transitive inference in either the or counting conditions.