El proceso de contarUna perspectiva cognitiva

Abstract

Over the past decade cognitive psychology has gone deeply into the study of the early mathematical knowledge, specially into the counting skills, due to its role in the development of more sophisticated numerical skills. The studies about the cognitive counting skills have been being done from different perspectives, even though all of them can be framed under the general theory of hierarchical skills integration. In this paper counting models grouped in to two categories are analysed: 1) performance models, focused on procedural knowledge and 2) competencel models, concerned with conceptual knowledge underlying the counting procedures. All these works have contributed to a significant shift in the area of children�s early mathematical understanding as well as to a new orientation in early instruction. Nevertheless, there are still limitations like the difficulties in the formalization of changing from one level to a higher level of the skill, to rely on specific tasks and the lack of perceptual and creative components in the simulations of the counting process.