Setting the foundations for the development of mathematics achievement

20th October 2020 : 17:00 - 18:15

Category: Webinar

Speaker: Dr Iro Xenidou, Loughborough University

Location: Microsoft Teams Live

Audience: Public

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Abstract

Early years mathematics skills predict children’s future academic, financial and general life success. Thus, it is crucial to identify and understand the cognitive factors that explain children’s individual differences in pre-school maths skills and the role that they play in setting the foundations for the development of their future mathematical achievement. In this talk, I will present a series of studies which identify various domain-general and mathematics-specific cognitive abilities as important early predictors of children’s mathematics achievement. In particular, our studies highlight the importance of language and early symbolic approximate arithmetic skills.

About the speaker

I completed my undergraduate studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece (BSc in Psychology) and my masters at Leiden University in the Netherlands (Research MSc in Developmental Psychology). Following this, I completed my PhD at the Faculty of Psychology and Education at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands (with cum laude distinction). My PhD focused on the cognitive underpinnings of children’s mathematical skills. After that, I took on a one-year joint postdoctoral position with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the KU Leuven (Belgium) and at the end of 2015, I moved to the UK to start a lectureship at the Mathematics Education Centre (MEC) at Loughborough University. Currently, I am a Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Cognition at our newly founded Centre for Mathematical Cognition (https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/cmc/about/) at the MEC.