Early mathematical skills are a strong predictor of later academic achievement and life outcomes. Previous research has identified several basic numerical skills which are significant predictors of current and future mathematics achievement as children enter and progress through school. One such skill is transcoding, the ability to switch between spoken and written numerical formats in reading and writing numbers. I will present several studies showing that transcoding skills are robustly associated with mathematical performance and discuss in how far language affects the development of these skills. Much of this work is correlational, providing limited causal evidence. Thus, in the second part of my talk I will present results from a recently completed randomised controlled trial (RCT) that evaluated the effects of a transcoding training programme with 447 5- to 6-year-old children in Y1 classrooms in England. Our results highlight the importance of number transcoding skills in early primary school and show that targeted transcoding training can effectively improve children’s ability to manipulate and recognise numerical formats. However, transfer to broader mathematical outcomes may require longer-term training or integration with explicit mathematical instruction.
Silke is a development cognitive neuroscientist. She works at Department of Psychology at the University of York where she leads the Numerical Cognition Lab. Silke has been a Visiting Professor at the Department of Special Needs Education (UiO) since 2019 and is an associated researcher at the CREATE. Her research focuses on numerical and mathematical processing in typical and atypical development, the interactions between representations of number and space, developmental dyscalculia and the influence of language on number processing and arithmetic.