Kids can do
math. Can you?
In a famous
experiment, preschoolers were tested to see if they could conserve
number – that is recognize a quantity if the configuration is changed. Kids
were shown two rows of marbles and asked “Which row has more marbles?” The
marbles were lined up in matching rows, each having six marbles. Almost all of
the children said that the rows were equal.
Then one row
was stretched into a longer line (again each row had six marbles) and the
children were asked again, “Which row has more marbles?” This time, the
children pointed to the longer row. The researcher concluded that the children
failed to conserve number.
When other
researchers recreated the tests, this time using candy instead of marbles, most
of the children got the answer right! What had changed? Motivation. Candy is
much more interesting than marbles.
Yet further
tests proved that even with marbles, children can get the answer right if the
question is rephrased. When the researcher asked the same question twice (Which
row has more marbles?) the children assumed that the first answer was wrong and
changed their answer. If the question was asked differently (Does one row have
more marbles?), most got it right.
Teachers
know these phenomena. Students who know a concept inside-out-and-upside-down
balk or recant when asked to verify their response. They waver, thinking “If
she’s asking me again, I must have been wrong.” Sometimes they can’t answer the
same question when it was asked by someone or something else (let’s say the
standardized test) again.
People
personalize learning. We learn by association. That is, we take new ideas or
concepts into our learning banks by attaching them to concepts we already know
-- unlike a computer who stores each bit of information as a separate unit. For
example, we associate water with wet so we know that a bath, a puddle, a
rainfall and the ocean are connected and wet. One person might remember that
April has 30 days because of a silly rhyme while another might remember because
April 30th is her birthday. Our brains interact with the world to
make meaning.
The same is
true with math. Most children are eager to explore math concepts, but many
adults insist that children rely on “accepted” connections rather than
constructing their own. The children in the experiment had a sense of number
even if they couldn’t count in the conventional sense. The counting system
adults understand comes after the sense children apply to numbers.
Stanislaus
Dehaene, author of Number Sense: How the
Mind Creates Mathematics, wrote
that adult’s “insistence on mathematical computation at the expense of meaning”
actually handicaps young children when they are learning math concepts. When “arithmetic
is purely [a] scholastic affair, with no practical goal and no obvious meaning”
children may develop a math phobia. Children come to math ready to make
associations. They should not be forced to assume ours.
Children
love candy and they love math – when it is presented to them in the right way.
Adults can fan the “flickering flame’ of math in a child’s mind, fortifying and
sustaining it by allowing them time to explore and reason things out for
themselves.
So what do
experiments and experience prove? Kids can do math, and you can too. Give
children time, show enthusiasm, make it fun, and let them explore. They’ll make
meaningful math connections and connections are like candy – the more the
better.
Coming soon:
Innumeracy or “Why can’t I understand my first grader’s math homework?
