8. Limitations

There are several limitations to this study. First, the sample was cross sectional in nature. It would be beneficial to study the same children over a period of time to see the impacts that developmental changes in phonological working memory, executive functioning, receptive vocabulary, and phonological awareness have on number skills and vice versa.

behaviors that can be easily observed by teachers makes it easier to provide useful guidance for improving education for early childhood teachers and parents.

Predictors of Early Numeracy: Applied Measures in Two Childcare Contexts

We thank the Utah State University Agriculture Experiment Station for their support. Thanks to the parents, children, and providers who participated in this study, to Krista Gurko and Alexander Fronk who assisted with data collection,

Acknowledgements

Author details

147

Belinda Blevins-Knabe<sup>1</sup>

and Shawnee M. Hendershot<sup>3</sup>

2 Utah State University, Logan, USA

3 Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, USA

provided the original work is properly cited.

\*Address all correspondence to: ann.austin@usu.edu

© 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

, Jacob Esplin<sup>2</sup>

1 University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, USA

, Ann M. Berghout Austin<sup>2</sup>

\*

Roxane Pfister for assistance with data analysis.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.81065

Another limitation is the fact that the childcare center children were drawn from just three centers, limiting the independence and variability of this subsample. The family childcare sample was a bit more variable with children recruited from eight family care programs. However, in the region of the country in which this study took place family care programs are more plentiful than childcare centers. Many parents have a strong personal preference for family childcare over childcare centers, believing that it is preferable to find a family childcare provider whose values align with those of the family. Conducting similar research in another region is an important step in replicating our results.

A final limitation might have been our sample size and lack of statistical power to detect small effects. We might not have had sufficient statistical power to detect smaller relationships.

### 9. Conclusions

Best practices for encouraging the development of preschool mathematics are still emerging. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel [29] expressed concern that some preschools and childcare programs emphasize isolated, unconnected skills that do not support early mathematics development as well as other strategies. They argue for a developmental approach with curriculum progressing logically from less sophisticated topics into more sophisticated ones. Understanding the relationships between early mathematics development and other cognitive domains can improve our understanding of how young children develop foundational mathematical skills; likely identifying areas that use similar strategies [21].

Our work contributes to understanding the connections between young children's number skills, their linguistic skills, and executive functioning. The PALS, a measure of phonological awareness, predicted both the younger and older children's number skills. It was significant in all combinations of predictors and for both age groups. This result replicated the work of others who have reported the effect of phonological awareness on children's number skills [6, 17, 18].

Additionally, our results demonstrate that receptive language is a closely related influence on younger children's number skills. However, this pattern changed for older children and one of the components of executive functioning, phonological working memory, was more influential than receptive language on their number skills. The predictive relationship between the non-words repetition task and older children's number skills indicates that similar skills are involved. One likely candidate is the concept of a unit.

Although the children attending family childcare scored lower on many measures there was no evidence that the relationships between phonological awareness, executive functioning, and number skills differed so the same curricular approaches should work for both. Curricular support for building children's vocabulary and discrimination of language sounds could provide the foundation needed for the further development of phonological memory [33] and number skills. In addition, curriculum for older preschool children could focus on acquisition of units of language and as well as units for counting and for measuring.

The successful use of applied measures in this study provides a promising pathway for future research examining the connections between young children's number skills, linguistic skills, and executive functioning. In addition, the use of

behaviors that can be easily observed by teachers makes it easier to provide useful guidance for improving education for early childhood teachers and parents.
