Emergent notational understanding: Educational challenges from a developmental perspective

One of the most important goals in primary education is to guarantee literacy and numeracy, two crucial notational systems. Before schooling, children develop some fundamental knowledge on notations from which formal learning should depart. The literature has studied this knowledge, focusing on the development of notational production and interpretation, on the understanding of notational functions, and also on the development of the terminology to refer to the units of notations. The focus of this article is to analyze these in order to bridge the existing gap between research and practice. Five issues raised by the notational development literature that question well-established beliefs front which different practices may derive are discussed.