The bottom line: A simple parental questionnaire measuring children’s everyday ordering skills shows early promise as a screening tool for mathematical difficulties, with research from Queen’s University Belfast finding that how well young children grasp sequences and routines may signal their later maths performance. Around one in five children in the UK fails to meet the expected mathematics standard by age five, and accessible early identification tools could support timely intervention before difficulties become entrenched. The OPQ requires further refinement and validation against objective maths assessments, but its non-invasive, parent-led design makes it a practical candidate for wider use in educational and public health screening contexts.
Identifying children who are likely to struggle with mathematics has long been a challenge for parents and schools, particularly in the crucial first years of primary education. A new study published in the Psychreg Journal of Psychology suggests that a short parental questionnaire focused on everyday ordering skills could serve as a practical early warning system for mathematical difficulties.
The Order Processing Questionnaire, or OPQ, asks parents to rate their young child’s ability to carry out routine tasks that involve sequencing and order, such as recalling the order of daily events or grasping how the days of the week follow one another. Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast tested the questionnaire with parents of 509 children in their first year of primary school in Northern Ireland.
Patrick O’Connor, PhD, a senior lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast and one of the researchers behind the study, explained the thinking that shaped it. “Our study was motivated by the idea that mathematical ability may be supported by more general cognitive skills, particularly the ability to understand and process order. Everyday activities such as understanding sequences, planning steps in a task, or recognising routines all rely on ordering skills.”
The study used confirmatory factor analysis to assess whether the questionnaire’s proposed structure holds up in a large sample. The findings offered partial support for its existing two-part structure, which separates positively and negatively worded questions into distinct factors. Results were noticeably stronger for the positively worded items, which demonstrated acceptable reliability and better validity. The negatively worded questions performed less well, likely because there are only three of them compared to five in the positive group.
In the UK, around one in five children fails to meet the expected standard in mathematics by the age of five, and many go on to experience persistent difficulties throughout their school years. What makes the OPQ particularly appealing is that it does not test children directly. Instead, it draws on parental knowledge of everyday behaviour, making it low-pressure, quick to complete, and accessible to families regardless of educational background.
O’Connor noted the broader potential of this approach. “The findings suggest that everyday ordering skills may provide useful insight into early cognitive processes linked to mathematics. In the long term, tools like this could help educators and researchers identify children who may benefit from additional support before mathematical difficulties become more entrenched.”
The study does acknowledge clear limitations. Parental reports are inherently subjective and may not reflect what a child is actually capable of in a school setting. The research also did not include any direct measure of the children’s mathematical performance, and socioeconomic status was not measured despite being a well-established influence on early numeracy.
Looking ahead, O’Connor said the team plans to address these gaps directly. “Our next step is to examine how well the OPQ predicts children’s later mathematical performance. This will involve combining parental reports with teacher ratings and objective assessments of children’s maths skills.”
The OPQ is not yet a finished product, but as a non-invasive, parent-friendly method for flagging children who may be at risk of maths difficulties, it represents a worthwhile direction for early identification research.
