Society & Culture - Posted by William Harms-Chicago on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 16:48 - 3 Comments 
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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Teaching kids math early adds up
Parents should talk with their children early and often about numbers to ensure mathematics success. Even children who don't appear to comprehend the meanings of number words right away, demonstrate a clear advantage later. (Credit: iStockphoto)
U. CHICAGO (US) — The amount of time parents spend talking to their young children about numbers has a significant impact on how they learn mathematics.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
For example, children whose parents talk more often and earlier about numbers are more likely to understand the cardinal number principle—which states that the size of a set of objects is determined by the last number reached when counting the set.
“By the time children enter preschool, there are marked individual differences in their mathematical knowledge, as shown by their performance on standardized tests,” says Susan Levine, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.
Other studies have shown that the level of mathematics knowledge entering school predicts future success.
“These findings suggest that encouraging parents to talk about numbers with their children, and providing them with effective ways to do so, may positively impact children’s school achievement.”
The results of the study are published in the journal Developmental Psychology.
Although other researchers have examined early mathematics learning, Levine is the first to record parent-child interactions in the home and analyze the connections between parents’ number talk and subsequent performance.
Parents often point to objects and say there are three blocks on the floor, for instance. Children can repeat a string of numbers from an early age, but saying “one, two, three” is not the same as actually knowing that the words relate to set size, which is an abstraction.
Frequent use of number words is important, even if the child doesn’t appear to comprehend the meanings of the number words right away. Children who hear more number words in everyday conversation have a clear advantage in understanding how the count words refer to set size.
To perform the study, team members made five home visits and videotaped interactions between 44 youngsters and their parents. The taping sessions lasted for 90 minutes and were made at four-month intervals, when the youngsters were between the ages of 14 to 30 months.
The variation in number words was startling for researchers as they reviewed tapes of the 44 youngsters interacting with their parents in everyday activities. Some parents produced as few as four number words during the entire period they were studied, while others produced as many as 257.
“This amount of variation would amount to a range of approximately 28 to 1,799 number-related words in a week,” Levine says.
Those differences were shown to have a big impact at the end of the study, when the children were asked to connect the words for numbers with sets of squares presented on sheets of paper. For example, those children who heard a lot of number talk were more likely to respond correctly when shown a set of five squares and four squares and asked to “point to five.”
Researchers from Roger Williams University, Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology; and the University of Maryland contributed to the study, which was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center grant, and the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center.
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3 Comments
shashank
Anita
We used to play addition and subtraction games with my son beginning when he was approximately 18 months old. We asked him basic math problems, illustrating with cheerios, to distract him as he sat in his highchair and we spooned food into his mouth. He was also fascinated with the digital clock which, in the 1980′s, had the numbers on a cube that rolled. He used to stand in front of the clock holding on to the nightstand, and say “Goodbye eight! Hello nine!” I think he learned number sequence and perhaps decimal system from watching the clock. He’s now a Ph.D. and nano-scientist.
Jill
I agree with Anita. While neither of my kids have gone into a math related field – both are in communication and design; neither do they have a fear of numbers. Numbers, number games and puzzles – even baking and cutting pizza or cake, whether incorporating sets or addition or multiplication etc. can be started with kids really early and built on over the years. I think that a lot of the problems that students have with mathematics can be traced to parents who aren’t comfortable with the idea of “math” and so don’t necessarily express things in terms of numbers. In addition, there is also the accepted thought that math is hard and so it is acceptable to not do well. This becomes self perpetuating or possibly as demonstrated here generationally perpetuating. It would be interested to find out how many of the parents who produced low number word counts were raised in homes where “math is too hard” was acceptable or who also weren’t introduced to numbers consistantly and early.
I guess so. I recall that during my childhood days my father used to ‘talk numbers’ to me.
The result: I ended up as a quant.
- Shashank Vaid, Duke-Fuqua