Putting things in order! A systematic literature review on the ambiguity in descriptions, measurement, and terminology of ordinality

Ordinality is considered to be one of the core properties of numbers and its understanding is seen as foundational for children’s numerical development. During the last two decades, the research field on ordinality has witnessed a significant rise in studies indicating that performance in different ordinality tasks are significant predictors of mathematics achievement. Crucially however, the research literature on ordinality is characterized by substantial ambiguity regarding its descriptions, measures, and terminology. Accordingly, the purpose of the present systematic literature review was to gather, evaluate, and analyze the literature on ordinality from these aspects. In total, 148 articles were included from the research areas of mathematics education and numerical cognition Across these, 151 distinct descriptions of ordinality were identified that clustered into ten categories. In addition, 18 types of measures were used to assess ordinality knowledge, and 638 unique terms referring to the construct were identified. Notably, studies including the same description often used different measures. The results suggested that ordinality cannot be captured by a single description or measure, but should be treated as a multifaceted construct. Based on the results, a theoretical framework for ordinality is proposed.