Research on numerical cognition in Latin American countries (Investigación sobre cognición numérica en países latinoamericanos)

Over the last few decades, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) countries have increased their spending on education (Bertoni et al., 2018) significantly. Governments have raised the salaries of teachers to signal the importance of education and to attractmore students to select the teaching profession. Likewise, many reforms and programmes have been introduced to improve learning, especially in disadvantaged schools and areas. The available data suggest that increased spending combined with economic and social reforms have had an impact on educational outcomes such as improvement on primary and secondary completion rates and a slowly declining number of very poor performers. There has also beenmodest but sustained progress in closing the learning gap with more developed countries. However, education systems in LAC countries still lag significantly behind most developed countries in terms of student performance in international assessments, which illustrates persistent learning gaps. To guarantee that this slow progress in LAC countries would continue, we need to increase the amount of multidisciplinary collaboration in school development. One crucial aspect of the development of school and education is that the reforms should be based on tested ideas and solid research. Therefore, a constant dialogue between research and practice is required. To advance this discussion, we built this particular issue by inviting top experts from seven LAC countries to present the state-of-the-art situation in their countries. We focus on the current state of research in numerical cognition and how this new knowledge has or could contribute to educational practices. Naturally, raising the research on numerical cognition into focus for developing education and educational practices is a narrow perspective when we consider all the factors connected to learning and teaching. In Figure 1, we present a simplified influence diagram to put our question dealt with in this special issue in a broader context. The figure illustrates the complex and multifactorial nature of the whole topic as a research area.