An Approach to Model Children’s Inhibition During Early Literacy and Numeracy Acquisition

Abstract

Early literacy and numeracy skills are developed during childhood at kindergarten level. Among the many factors that influence the development of such skills, the literature shows that the executive function of inhibition – i.e. the blocking out or tuning out of information or action that is irrelevant to the learning task – is one of the most important. There are many tests to assess children’s inhibition skills; however, such tests are generally time-consuming and have a short lifespan. In this context, we propose a computational approach to model children’s inhibition skills by using only student traces from a learning app as input. We propose a mathematical formalization of three related inhibition features, which could be used as input to classification algorithms.