This study is to find out if there exist class differences in children's capacities in areas of counting, classification, and equal partitioning. For the research, the oral counting task, the standardized test and the informal task for classification...
This study is to find out if there exist class differences in children's capacities in areas of counting, classification, and equal partitioning. For the research, the oral counting task, the standardized test and the informal task for classification, and the equal partition task were administered individually to 40 four-year old children from each of middle class and low class. The results are as follows ; (1) The children from the middle-class outperformed those from low class in the task of numbers, whether they used homegrown Korean counting words or those derived from Chinese character (2) The middle-class children also displayed higher classification ability, in both simple and complicated classification, than their lower class counterparts (3) The middle-class children produced higher success rates and adopted better strategies in equal partitioning as well, regardless of whether the objects were continuous or discontinuous quantities. When the number of objects provided the children were higher than they could count orally, the children showed a bigger difference in partitioning discontinuous quantities than in partitioning continuous ones.