Enhancing Multi-Digit Number Knowledge Through Number Board Games

Abstract

Young children start to make sense of multi-digit numbers well before they are taught formally in school. Although informal activities in daily life appear to play an important role, it seems that no intervention study has been taken to examine such possibility. Informal activities such as number board games have been found to be effective in enhancing basic number knowledge. In the present study, we aimed to examine whether such games would be useful in helping young children to understand multi-digit numbers. Ninety-one children studying in the lower kindergarten in Hong Kong played some board games for 30 minutes each day for six days. They were randomly divided into four groups. Three groups of children played number line board games (i.e., roll the dice and move one’s token forward the number of spaces as rolled on the dice). The experimenters helped the children to map the numbers onto their magnitudes on the number line (mapping condition), or drew the children’s attention to the ordinal sequence of the numbers (ordinal condition), or did both (mapping and ordinal condition). Another group of children played colour board games which had nothing to do with numbers (control condition). All children completed a multi-digit number comparison task before and after the games. Results showed a significant group difference in the post-test, after controlling for the pre-test performance. In particular, the mapping group performed significantly better than the ordinal group in the number comparison task after playing the games. These findings suggest that playing number board games, especially when the number-magnitude mapping is highlighted, can help young children to make sense of multi-digit numbers.