Young children's cognitive representations of number and their number line estimations

This article reports findings from an exploratory multiple case-study investigating children’s cognitive representations of number. The article considers the case of one child at the end of Year One (6 years old) and the findings from her participation in the pilot stage of a larger study following fifteen children over one school year. Multimodal analysis was carried out on video recordings of children’s participation in individual task-based interviews. Clearly distinguishable strategies, in which many structural aspects of natural number were represented, were identified during interactions with number line estimation tasks. Structural similarities were identified between the imagistic representations of number demonstrated in the interview, and representations of number during number line estimation tasks.