Promoting early abstraction to promote early literacy and numeracy

Children who received learning-set instruction on unidimensional classification, unidimensional seriation, and number conservation in the middle of kindergarten were retested at the end of 1st grade. The follow-up tests showed that a 17-percentile-point advantage conveyed by this instruction on the O-LSAT measure of school-related reasoning was essentially intact. It also appeared that a 10-percentile-point gain in mathematics, presumably an indirect effect of the increased competence in reasoning, was also intact. On the other hand, there was no longer any difference between experimental and control children in verbal comprehension. These results are discussed in terms of temporary, permanent, and self-propagating gains.