Counting - Education and Development

Education and Development

Learning to count is an important educational/developmental milestone in most cultures of the world. Learning to count is a child's very first step into mathematics, and constitutes the most fundamental idea of that discipline. However, some cultures in Amazonia and the Australian Outback do not count, and their languages do not have number words.

Many children at just 2 years of age have some skill in reciting the count list (i.e., saying "one, two, three, ..."). They can also answer questions of ordinality for small numbers, e.g., "What comes after three?". They can even be skilled at pointing to each object in a set and reciting the words one after another. This leads many parents and educators to the conclusion that the child knows how to use counting to determine the size of a set. Research suggests that it takes about a year after learning these skills for a child to understand what they mean and why the procedures are performed. In the mean time, children learn how to name cardinalities that they can subitize.

Children with Williams syndrome often display serious delays in learning to count.