Number processing and calculation in 2nd and 3rd grade school children: A comparative study of French-speaking and German-speaking children

The present study provides a comparison between children of the second and third grades from Paris (F) and Zurich (CH). The children completed a neuropsychological test battery of 11 subtests for the assessment of number-processing and calculation. The results are not homogeneous for the various aspects of number-processing and calculation abilities. Some aspects (i.e., reading Arabic numbers and writing Arabic numbers from dictation) seem to be developmentally more dependent on the onset and duration of systematic school instruction than others (i.e., simple mental addition and substraction, problem solving). In mental calculation and problem-solving tasks there was no difference between the 8-year-old second-grade Swiss children and the 8-year-old third-grade French children, whereas in transcoding tasks (reading and writing numbers) there was a highly significant difference between the pupils of the different grades. In addition, the 8-year-old second-grade Swiss children showed a markedly weaker performance than the 7-year-old French children of the same grade level in writing Arabic numbers from dictation, but not in reading Arabic numbers. Item and error analyses indicate that this difference can partly be attributed to linguistic factors. The results are discussed with regard to possible implications for primary-school instruction in mathematics, especially for foreign language children in German speaking countries.