A Network Analysis of Children’s Emerging Place-Value Concepts

Bower, Corinne A., Mix, Kelly S., Yuan, Lei and Smith, Linda B. (2022) A Network Analysis of Children’s Emerging Place-Value Concepts. Psychological Science, 33 (7). pp. 1112-1127. ISSN 0956-7976

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Abstract

Examining how informal knowledge systems change after formal instruction is imperative to understanding learning processes and conceptual development and to implementing effective educational practices. We used network analyses to determine how the organization of informal knowledge about multidigit numbers in kindergartners (N = 279; mean age = 5.76 years, SD = 0.55; 135 females) supports and is transformed by a year of in-school formal instruction. The results show that in kindergarten, piecemeal knowledge about the surface properties of reading and writing multidigit numbers and the use of base-10 units to determine large quantities are strongly associated with each other and connected in a stringlike manner to other emerging skills. After a year of instruction, each skill becomes connected to the “hub” abilities of reading and writing multidigit numbers, which also become strongly connected to more advanced knowledge of base-10 principles. These findings provide new insights into how partial knowledge provides the backbone on which explicit principles are learned.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data: Deidentified data and analysis scripts have been made publicly available via the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland and can be accessed at http://hdl.handle.net.uea.idm.oclc.org/1903/21495; access to the data is limited to qualified researchers. The materials used in these studies are widely available. The design and analysis plans for the study were not preregistered. This article has received the badge for Open Data. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/badges.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	knowledge structure,mathematical learning,multidigit numbers,network analysis,open data,place-value understanding,general psychology ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3200/3200
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Related URLs:	https://www.scopus.com/pages/publication...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	18 Jun 2026 21:02
Last Modified:	18 Jun 2026 21:02
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/103447
DOI:	10.1177/09567976211070242

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