ABSTRACT
Most Western number systems are constructed upon a base-10 structure. Children need to understand this base-10 system (Fuson, Wearne, Hiebert, Murray, Human, Olivier, Carpenter & Fennema, 1997 and Fuson, 1998), including the fact that the value of an Arabic digit depends upon its position within the number (see Becker & Varelas, 1993). This understanding will have an impact on children’s ability to read and write numbers (i.e., transcoding skills) and to solve multi-digit number calculations. In this chapter, we review the literature describing the development of these processes, show the difficulties that can appear at this level in children with math learning disabilities, and present the intervention studies that have been published (e.g., Mix, Smith, Stockton, Cheng & Barterian, 2017 or Zhang & Okamoto, 2017). Based on all this research, we propose some tools on how to assess this development in children and then give clear and detailed guidelines on how to intervene to help children with difficulties at that level.
