Assessing young children's mathematical abilities through games

This paper outlines an innovative approach to the assessment of young children's informal mathematical abilities through the use of especially designed games. The range of games focus on a small number of critical aspects of mathematics identified in the research literature as being strong predictive factors of later success in mathematics at school. Examples of two of these games, and the results from a pilot study are presented. Children in the pilot phase were from Hungary, Australia and Malaysia, and were between two and six years of age. Two of the games, one for number and one for spatial sense, are presented here as examples of the approach taken by the researchers.