Dot Enumeration Performance of Low SES children: Groupitizing Disadvantages Prevalent among Low SES Children

Over the past 50 years, the socioeconomic status (SES) achievement gap in math has widened as academia and practice have failed to deeply understand the underlying mechanisms and take adequate action to inhibit the growth of this inequality.

This paper builds on existing literature that has shown disadvantages in cognitive abilities related to math for low SES children. In my research, I ask whether low SES children demonstrate groupitizing (dis)advantages in dot enumeration  - one such cognitive ability linked to math abilities. I use data from 500 low SES children followed for two years from grade 5 to 6. By employing mixed effects modeling, I find only little evidence of groupitizing advantage for these low SES children, in line with prior research. I do, however, find a significicant groupitizing advantage in grade 5, specifically children are able to enumerate grouped dots faster. Notably, I demonstrate early evidence that the groupitizing advantage in accuracy and latency shrinks or diminishes when removing all observations in which children enumerated dots with the same subgroups (e.g. 3+3+3) and not different subgroups (e.g. 4+3+2) (“Same Subgroup Effect”). These findings provide crucial insights into groupitizing abilities of low SES children to further our understanding of the SES achievement gap in math.