Kids Can Do Math. Can You?

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 30^th 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?