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Recently, Lyndsey Layton reported in the Washington Post about research that has shown that young children are ready for math early in life, and capable of direct instruction at very young ages. The study from Michigan State University shows that children as young as 3 can understand multi digit numbers, place value, and meaning.“Contrary to the view that young children do not understand place value and multi-digit numbers, we found that they actually know quite a lot about it,” said Kelly Mix, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University and a lead investigator on the study.
About The Research
The research comes as teachers, policymakers and government officials have been increasingly dismayed by U.S. students’ math performance on internationally benchmarked exams. This month, the results of a well-regarded international exam placed U.S. teenagers at below average in math compared with their counterparts in 64 other countries and economies.
Educators and researchers have long assumed that children do not have the capacity to fully understand place value and to accurately compute multi-digit numbers until at least second grade. The ability to add and subtract multi-digit numbers is a gateway skill, an important prerequisite for higher-order math.
Researchers had dismissed the abilities of younger children to handle multi-digit numbers because they make frequent errors. But Mix said those kinds of errors are often “intelligent” mistakes that belie at least a partial grasp of the underlying math. Actually, young children are ready for math early in life.
What’s more, young learners can be taught to improve their calculations, she said.
Funded with a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Education Department and published this week in the journal Child Development, the research examined how well children ages 3 to 7 could identify and compare two- and three-digit numbers.
The researchers tested about 200 children from ethnically diverse, middle-income communities in Michigan and Indiana.
Young Children Ready for Math Earlier Than Previously Believed
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One surprising finding of the research was that when children were asked to compute with numerals, they performed significantly better than when they were given “manipulatives” — learning tools they could hold in their hands, such as blocks — or were shown visual arrays of numbers, such as dots in a box.
But that’s not so, Mix found.
“They can learn math faster with .?.?. numerals, which is counterintuitive,” she said. “We’ve always believed that younger children needed to learn through concrete models. But it turns out they can do it faster with symbolic numbers.”
Very young children learn math because they are continually exposed to multi-digit numbers, whether from telephone numbers or price tags. Mix said they might begin to understand numbers from language because adults are continually talking about numbers, whether they are commenting on a calendar, asking their children to push a number in an elevator or looking for a room number in an office building.
While the research suggests that kindergartners are ready for multi-digit math instruction, Mix said educators should take a balanced approach.
Lyndsey Layton is the education reporter for the Washington Post
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