Preschoolers' Counting and Sharing

Both counting and sharing require action on discrete elements, entailing the logic of one-to-one correspondence. How counting and sharing relate to one another was the focus of an experiment conducted to examine strategies preschool children used to subdivide items. We designed tasks in which applications of counting skills, of visual cues such as subitizing, and of informal measurement skills were made more difficult. Children exhibited alternative strategies, suggesting use of a recipient as a mental cycle marker and an adjacent recipient strategy, with pauses between allocations suggesting a re-presentation of lots corresponding to the number of recipients. Results supported the view that dealing competence does not relate directly to counting skill.