Although subitising occurs in pre-verbal infants (Xu, Spelke, & Goddard, 2005), 11 per cent of Kindergarten children could not verbally
subitise two dots.
In fact, even after one-on-one instruction, he often would subitise or estimate how many objects were present and then change his counting to match his guess:
Embedded within the construct of cardinality (and a student's understanding of number) is the student's ability to subitise. Subitising, a perceptual activity whereby young children quickly attend to the numerosity of a small set of items, has been shown to change to provide support for students' initial use of subgroups when composing a total amount (MacDonald & Shumway, 2016).
The ability to
subitise is not based on pre-verbal counting (or even fast counting), and is commonly limited to no more than four objects (Balakrishnan & Ashby, 1992).
accessed without counting (DC) * Conservation of Number (C&S, KR) Different forms of a number (Ma) * (F) Connect number names, numerals and quantities (ACMNA002) * (F)
Subitise small collections (ACMNA003) Perceptual 2 (P2) * Perceptual subitiser to 5 (C&S) 0-5 * Sees number patterns up to 5 (KR) One card at a time.
With regard to young Indigenous students and number, the literature identifies the ability to subitise as intuitive knowledge about mathematics that young Indigenous students bring to the classroom.
While the results of the Evaluation of Mathematics in Indigenous Context Project (Aboriginal Education Board of Studies NSW, 2007)--a large project involving seven schools, 18 teachers and 450 students from Kindergarten to Year 2--showed that Indigenous students' ability to subitise improved with intervention after one year of school, it was not possible to draw conclusions from the results because of inconsistency of testing across sites and the lack of data on the intervention that occurred at each site.
On reflection, children may have been relying on their ability to
subitise small numbers and had not linked this idea with the idea of counting.
Photographs taken by children can become the basis of materials used in mathematics games to facilitate children's ability to
subitise. For example, a photograph of a collection of 7 items can be made into a card which matches another card showing the numeral 7 or 7 dots.
The ability to
subitise is not based on preverbal counting (or even fast counting), and is commonly limited to no more than four objects.
It has also been found that children can usually
subitise before being able to count and that it may even be a necessary antecedant to counting (Klein & Starkey, 1988).
We also used these cards to see if children could
subitise small quantities.