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posted by martyb on Friday August 05 2016, @10:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the counting-on-maths dept.

AAAS' EurekaAlert describes research from University of Missouri which finds that kindergarteners are more successful when they understand the meaning of number words and can manipulate number sets.

While many studies have been conducted on infants' and preschoolers' math competencies, few have evaluated how toddlers' basic mathematics knowledge relates to early elementary school success. Now, in a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers at the University of Missouri discovered that preschoolers who better process words associated with numbers, such as "three" or "four," and understand the quantities associated with these words are more likely to have success with math when they enter kindergarten. Findings also reveal that children who have a basic understanding that addition increases quantity and subtraction decreases it are much better prepared for math in school. Scientists contend that emphasis on these two skillsets could lead to greater success in school.

[...] The study, "Kindergarteners' fluent processing of symbolic numerical magnitude is predicted by their cardinal knowledge and implicit understanding of arithmetic 2 years earlier," recently was published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. The NSF (Grant 1250359) and the University of Missouri Research Board provided funding for the project.

[AAAS = American Association for the Advancement of Science. -Ed.]


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @10:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @10:53PM (#384647)

    I wonder how much this depends on the manner in which math is taught to those kindergartners.

    I remember that during my earliest math classes we were given small physical blocks to use. The math sheets also had squares on them for those blocks. So you'd physically put e.g. 3 blocks on the sheet, then add 2 blocks, and then count the total number of blocks to get the answer.

    Now if I was taught solely conceptually via e.g. the blackboard, I'm sure learning math would've been much harder.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Saturday August 06 2016, @01:38AM

    by Francis (5544) on Saturday August 06 2016, @01:38AM (#384671)

    A proper mathematical curriculum goes from extremely concrete while dealing with arithmetic to highly abstract when dealing with higher level mathematics.

    One of the areas where teachers often get it wrong is going too abstract too early or waiting until calculus and then getting extremely abstract and cryptic before the students have been taught to approach problems like that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @05:10AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @05:10AM (#384698)

      It wouldn't need to be so abstract if they integrated programming into the classes.

      • (Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday August 06 2016, @02:54PM

        by Francis (5544) on Saturday August 06 2016, @02:54PM (#384762)

        Not really, all that does is introduce a great amount of inefficiency into the classroom. The same basic people that find abstract mathematics hard are the people who find programming hard. Adding additional programming into the classroom environment doesn't add anything that properly taught math wouldn't in this context.

        If you already have programming in the curriculum, then by all means leverage it to help with the abstraction, but adding it to an already tight schedule is unlikely to end well.