Background. There are considerable amount of research studying the relationship and effect of approximate number system (ANS) from childhood to adults, which many of these shown positive results. It also indicates the importance of early mathematics education on early childhood age that can influence their future math performance. However, as far as our knowledge, there is no study yet exploring the effect of symbolic and non-symbolic magnitude representations training on ANS and exact number system (ENS), especially in developing country such as Indonesia. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the difference of symbolic and non-symbolic magnitude representation training effect on number sense, namely the ANS and understanding of cardinality principle.

Methods. 44 children aged 4-6 years old (M= 5.3038; SD=0.8032) were recruited from three kindergartens within the same area with consent from their respective headmasters. They were divided into 3 groups; Control Group, AT Group and ET Group. AT group was given non-symbolic mathematics task during training sessions, while ET Group was given symbolic mathematics. 6 sets of training were conducted within two weeks (three times a week). Children who were not be able to finished all sets of training were excluded from further analysis. At the beginning and the end of the training , children’s ANS acuity and understanding in cardinality principle were measured. Dots comparison task (Panamath) were used for non-symbolic mathematics training and to measure ANS acuity. Weber fraction and accuracy are the parameters for ANS acuity. Children’s understanding of cardinality principle were measured using Give-N-Task. For symbolic mathematic training, PC based game called The Number Race were used. The duration for one sets of training for both groups was about 5 to 10 minutes.

Results. A Two-way analysis was conducted using Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney test to find the difference between groups. These method were used due to small amount of participants. Analysis showed there was no significant difference in ENS, ANS accuracy and weber fraction value before and after training. Analyses between pretest and post-test data based on intervention groups also didn’t showed significant results in all parameters. The difference within and between each age category (in 4, 5, and 6 years-old) and based on the treatment for pretest and post-test also didn’t showed significant results. However, there were a difference in mean between each age category after training. The highest mean were in 4 years-old group for ANS acuity and 5 years-old group for understanding cardinality principle.

Conclusions. Contribution of symbolic and non-symbolic mathematics training were not give significant result in improvement of ANS acuity and understanding in cardinality principle even we analyzed between ages category. More participants were needed to give more reliable results as the number of children in this study were limited. On the other hand,  additional training sessions could be conducted to give a better result. The design of symbolic and non-symbolic training might be not right and need more evaluation and modification.

Added-Values. This study is one of the first study that investigate ANS and ENS as the main topic in Indonesia. We also wanted to prove which training is the optimal for improving children’s ANS acuity and understanding of cardinality principal.

Contribution to the society. This study has potential to give contribution to Indonesian early childhood mathematics education because early childhood education is important to improve their school achievement. Also Indonesian’s mathematical competence according to many data such as PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) data is still below average.

Keywords: approximate number system, exact number system, symbolic, non-symbolic, mathematics

Word Count. 574 words