Short number-line training boosts preschoolers’ estimation skills and early maths performance

A brief, game-based number-line exercise enhances young children’s estimation accuracy and early maths scores, offering a scalable tool to support numerical development in preschool settings, according to a recent study.

A brief, game-based number-line training task helped preschool children improve both their estimation accuracy and early maths scores, according to a study published in Frontiers in Psychology. The trial involved 114 children in southern Sweden and compared a group that received three short training sessions with a control group that continued with normal preschool activities. The researchers said the children who practised placing numbers on a bounded 0-to-20 line, with feedback after each attempt, showed a marked improvement in number-line performance and a smaller but statistically significant gain on a separate early maths test.

The findings add weight to a long-running debate in numerical cognition about whether children first build symbolic number understanding on top of rough, approximate quantity skills, or whether learning exact numbers helps sharpen approximate number sense. In this study, both patterns appeared to be present. The researchers found that stronger symbolic skills at the start predicted later nonsymbolic performance, supporting the view that exact number knowledge can refine approximate processing. At the same time, stronger nonsymbolic skills at the start predicted later symbolic performance, consistent with the idea that approximate quantity representations can support symbolic development.

The training itself was designed as a child-friendly “frog game” in which children guessed where a target number belonged on a line, then received immediate feedback. According to the study, this format appears to have done more than improve the trained task. It was also associated with a modest boost in broader early maths ability, suggesting that a short intervention can have benefits beyond the specific skill being practised. The researchers noted that the effect was smaller than the gain in number-line accuracy, but still meaningful given that the programme took only three 10-minute sessions.

The study also points to number-line estimation as a possible bridge between approximate and exact number systems. The authors said the approximate-to-symbolic pathway was stronger in the training group than in the control group, which they interpret as moderate directional evidence that the intervention may have helped children coordinate the two systems more closely. They cautioned that the work did not include long-term follow-up, so it remains unclear how durable the effects are, but they argued that the task could be a practical, scalable tool for early maths teaching.