A direct comparison of two measures of ordinal knowledge among 8-year-olds
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children’s knowledge of the ordinal relations among number symbols is related to their mathematical learning. Ordinal knowledge has been measured using judgment (i.e., decide whether a sequence of three digits is in order) and ordering tasks (i.e., order three digits from smallest to largest). However, the question remains whether performance on these two ordinal tasks tap into similar cognitive processes. Canadian children (N = 87; Age M = 8.7 years, Grade 3) completed symbolic number tasks (i.e., number comparison, ordering, and order judgment) and measures of arithmetic fluency (i.e., addition and subtraction) and working memory (i.e., digit span backward). For both ordinal tasks, there was a reverse distance effect for ordered sequences such that children responded faster to adjacent than to non-adjacent sequences (e.g., 2 3 4 vs. 4 7 9) and a canonical distance effect for unordered sequences such that children responded faster to non-adjacent than to adjacent sequences (e.g., 4 2 3 vs. 4 9 7). Working memory and number comparison each predicted unique variance in the ordinal measures (ordering, order judgment, and a latent ordinal factor based on the two measures). Furthermore, ordinal skills superseded the role of number comparison as the key predictor of arithmetic, controlling for children’s gender and working memory skills. In summary, although both ordering and order judgment tasks index ordinal knowledge, a latent factor that excludes task-specific error may be a better index than either task separately.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it