Posts tagged mathematical skills
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
No math gene: learning mathematics takes practice
New research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology shows that if you want to be good at math, you have to practice all different kinds of maths.
What makes someone good at math? A love of numbers, perhaps, but a willingness to practice, too. And even if you are good at one specific type of math, you can’t trust your innate abilities enough to skip practicing other types if you want to be good.
New research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim could have an effect on how math is taught. If you want to be really good at all types of math, you need to practice them all. You can’t trust your innate natural talent to do most of the job for you.
This might seem obvious to some, but it goes against the traditional view that if you are good at math, it is a skill that you are simply born with.
Professor Hermundur Sigmundsson at Department of Psychology is one of three researchers involved in the project. The results have been published in Psychological Reports.
The numbers
The researchers tested the math skills of 70 Norwegian fifth graders, aged 10.5 years on average. Their results suggest that it is important to practice every single kind of math subject to be good at all of them, and that these skills aren’t something you are born with.
“We found support for a task specificity hypothesis. You become good at exactly what you practice,” Sigmundsson says.
Nine types of math tasks were tested, from normal addition and subtraction, both orally and in writing, to oral multiplication and understanding the clock and the calendar.
“Our study shows little correlation between (being good at) the nine different mathematical skills, Sigmundsson said. “For instance there is little correlation between being able to solve a normal addition in the form of ‘23 + 67’ and addition in the form of a word problem.”
This example might raise a few eyebrows. Perhaps basic math is not a problem for the student, but the reading itself is. Up to 20 per cent of Norwegian boys in secondary school have problems with reading.
Sigmundsson also finds support in everyday examples.
“Some students will be good at geometry, but not so good at algebra,” he says.
If that is the case they have to practice more algebra, which is the area where most students in secondary school have problems.
“At the same time this means there is hope for some students. Some just can’t be good at all types of math, but at least they can be good at geometry, for example,” he says.
It is this finding that might in the end help change the way math is taught.
Support in neurology
The fact that you are good at precisely what you practice is probably due to the fact that different kinds of practice activate different neural connections.
The results can also be transferred to other areas. The football player who practices hitting the goal from 25 yards with a perfectly placed shot will become good at exactly this. But she is not necessarily good at tackling or reading the game.
“This is also supported by new insights in neurology. With practice you develop specific neural connections,” says Sigmundsson.
(Source: alphagalileo.org)
Autistic kids who best peers at math show different brain organization
Children with autism and average IQs consistently demonstrated superior math skills compared with nonautistic children in the same IQ range, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
“There appears to be a unique pattern of brain organization that underlies superior problem-solving abilities in children with autism,” said Vinod Menon, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a member of the Child Health Research Institute at Packard Children’s.
The autistic children’s enhanced math abilities were tied to patterns of activation in a particular area of their brains — an area normally associated with recognizing faces and visual objects.
Menon is senior author of the study, published online Aug. 17 in Biological Psychiatry. Postdoctoral scholar Teresa luculano, PhD, is the lead author.
Children with autism have difficulty with social interactions, especially interpreting nonverbal cues in face-to-face conversations. They often engage in repetitive behaviors and have a restricted range of interests.
But in addition to such deficits, children with autism sometimes exhibit exceptional skills or talents, known as savant abilities. For example, some can instantly recall the day of the week of any calendar date within a particular range of years — for example, that May 21, 1982, was a Friday. And some display superior mathematical skills.
“Remembering calendar dates is probably not going to help you with academic and professional success,” Menon said. “But being able to solve numerical problems and developing good mathematical skills could make a big difference in the life of a child with autism.”
The idea that people with autism could employ such skills in jobs, and get satisfaction from doing so, has been gaining ground in recent years.
The participants in the study were 36 children, ages 7 to 12. Half had been diagnosed with autism. The other half was the control group. Each group had 14 boys and four girls. (Autism disproportionately affects boys.) All participants had IQs in the normal range and showed normal verbal and reading skills on standardized tests administered as part of the recruitment process for the study. But on the standardized math tests that were administered, the children with autism outperformed children in the control group.
After the math test, researchers interviewed the children to assess which types of problem-solving strategies each had used: Simply remembering an answer they already knew; counting on their fingers or in their heads; or breaking the problem down into components — a comparatively sophisticated method called decomposition. The children with autism displayed greater use of decomposition strategies, suggesting that more analytic strategies, rather than rote memory, were the source of their enhanced abilities.
Then, the children worked on solving math problems while their brain activity was measured in an MRI scanner, in which they had to lie down and remain still. The brain scans of the autistic children revealed an unusual pattern of activity in the ventral temporal occipital cortex, an area specialized for processing visual objects, including faces.
“Our findings suggest that altered patterns of brain organization in areas typically devoted to face processing may underlie the ability of children with autism to develop specialized skills in numerical problem solving,” Iuculano said.
“These findings not only empirically confirm that high-functioning children with autism have especially strong number-problem-solving abilities, but show that this cognitive strength in math is based on different patterns of functional brain organization,” said Carl Feinstein, MD, director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Packard Children’s and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the School of Medicine. He was not involved in the study.
Menon added that previous research “has focused almost exclusively on weaknesses in children with autism. Our study supports the idea that the atypical brain development in autism can lead, not just to deficits, but also to some remarkable cognitive strengths. We think this can be reassuring to parents.”
The research team is now gathering data from a larger group of children with autism to learn more about individual differences in their mathematical abilities. Menon emphasized that not all children with autism have superior math abilities, and that understanding the neural basis of variations in problem-solving abilities is an important topic for future research.
(Image: Corbis)