BC Prof Suggests Young Children Need Less Formal Math, Not More

DesScorp writes "Professor Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist and researcher at Boston College, recounts an experiment done in New Hampshire schools in 1929, where math was completely taken out of the curriculum of the poorest schools from the area until the sixth grade. The results were surprising; with just one year of math under their belts, the poor students did as well or better than students from better schools by the end of the sixth grade year, despite the fact that the better schools had math in their curriculum all throughout elementary school. Professor Gray thinks children are not mentally wired for the kind of formal math instruction that is taught in schools, and that we'd be better served by putting off the teaching of theory until the seventh grade. He scoffs at the notion that if children are failing with current levels of math instructions then we should double down and make them do more math in school."

Comments

Or could it be the way they're taught

[0racle]

I've long felt that math taught in grades 1-7~8 could be compressed into a year or two with no repercussions. They just 'teach' the same thing over and over and it's not until middle school that you start really seeing anything different.

grade 1-3 - addition, subtraction, basic shapes (passed off as geometry)
grade 4-6 - addition, subtraction, basic shapes, might see a fraction by grade 6
grade 6-8 - all of the above, fractions, simple geometry.

Then in grade 8-9 where they start to introduce simple algebra.

So is it that children don't do well learning math early, which goes against everything else we know about how the human brain learns, or that you've bored them to tears by grade 3 and they just stop listening?

Re:As someone who was better than average...

[Jane_Dozey]

A Mathematicians Lament. I really wish more teachers would read this essay.