Building on Math Intuition
Posted by David Dockterman on Thu, Sep 29, 2011 @ 08:38 PM
We’re born to do math. Really. Despite complaints from children and adults that “I’m just not good at math,” we all come into the world with some fundamental mathematical abilities. For instance, we – humans, horses, chimps, birds, and lots of other animals -- can
subitize.
Subitization is the ability to recognize small quantities without counting. We know, for example, that the picture to the right (from a BBC subitization game) shows 4 dots without counting 1, 2, 3, 4. After about 3 or 4 we humans have to resort to counting. You can read more and play the game here.
We are also able to compare. We can, at a glance, tell that 20 flesh-eating zombies in the front yard are a lot more than 5 flesh-eating zombies. This innate capability, another that we share across the animal kingdom, has great survival value. Should I stay and fight, or are there too many of “them” compared to the number of us? Actually, I guess in the case of flesh-eating zombies, I’d likely run away even I had them clearly outnumbered.
Most of us can readily tell which of two groups is larger when one has at least twice as many objects as the other. As you’d expect, the distinction becomes more difficult as the ratio gets closer to 1:1. It’s easy to tell the difference between 40 and 20, not so easy between 40 and 30, and really hard between 40 and 35.
It turns out that this ability to compare quantities correlates highly to academic success in math, and some children are better at it than others. Test your abilities here.
Prior research at Johns Hopkins University showed that adolescents who are good at those hard comparisons had a history of success in math at school. But did one cause the other? A more recent study from those Johns Hopkins’ researchers suggests that our infant skills may set the stage for the later success. Preschoolers who had good comparison skills also had good math performance once they got to school, compared to preschoolers with less comparison number sense. Now, is this type of number sense completely innate, or can we foster it even among babies and toddlers? More research to come.