Rice Paddies And Math Tests
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Rice Paddies And Math Tests
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Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests
#2I'd be interested to see some data on how children learning math in Hindi do, because the numbers are even less regular, enough so that even though there's a pattern, you still have to learn all the numbers from 1-100 individually. There are also more specific words for different fractions, such as a word for 3/4 that sounds nothing like the word for 1/4.
http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/language/number/hindi.html
http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/jishnu/101/numbersfractions/d...
(My apologies if any of this is wrong. I'm not a native speaker, just took a few years of Hindi in college.)
Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests
#3Very interesting. I've never heard any breakdown of their being a different approach to numbers in any system so that was neat.
Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests
#4This is why we need to teach numbers and concepts, not names.
I admit that the English number system is flawed, but that's what digits are for, right? 37 = 3(10s)7. Its just a shortcut, we can express 37 to be 3*10 + 7, but its just not worth saying every time
Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests
#5This is why we need to teach numbers and concepts, not names. I admit that the English number system is flawed, but that's what digits are for, right? 37 = 3(10s)7. Its just a shortcut, we can express 37 to be 3*10 + 7, but its just not worth saying every time
You still have to say "thirty seven", or mentally say "three times ten plus seven", before you do the calculation.
Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests
#6Interesting article overall, but I found the following a little spurious:
>For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, 'out of five parts, take three.' That's telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It's differentiating the denominator and the numerator.
It's not obvious to me that one is better than the other, and he's not providing data to support such a claim. Is it just me, or is he just playing with semantics here?
Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests
#7Ah yes, another hack who believes math is all about memorization and fast arithmetic. Who cares if our 7 year olds can add slower? We all add the same speed once we lift the calculator ban. And once you start doing real (abstract) math, this memorization advantage becomes completely useless. I'll believe the "Chinese Math Dominance" story when I see it.
Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests
#8Sounds fishy to me. In german, numbers are logical but excruciatingly long to say in words. There's no huge lag in german math skills because it takes a little longer to say the numbers than in english.
Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests
#9Interesting article overall, but I found the following a little spurious: >For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, 'out of five parts, take three.' That's telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It's differentiating the denominator and the numerator. It's not obvious to me that one is better than the other, and he's not providing data to support such a claim. Is it just me, or is he just pl…
Miller, K. F., Smith, C. M., Zhu, J. & Zhang, H. Preschool origins of cross-national differences in mathematical competence: The role of number-naming systems. Psychological Science, 6, 56-60.
Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests
#10Ah yes, another hack who believes math is all about memorization and fast arithmetic. Who cares if our 7 year olds can add slower? We all add the same speed once we lift the calculator ban. And once you start doing real (abstract) math, this memorization advantage becomes completely useless. I'll believe the "Chinese Math Dominance" story when I see it.
You're not reading the hypothesis correctly:
Asian children, by contrast, don't face nearly that same sense of bafflement... maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.
The argument is not that the clarity of the Chinese-language numbers is, in itself, that big of an advantage once kids grow beyond four, five, or seven years of age. The argument is that kids who are comfortable with math at age four are more likely to remain happy with math throughout the rest of their schooling, whereas loss of confidence at an early age results in loss of future confidence.
Obviously, while you can test the difference in math skills among seven-year-olds, this stronger hypothesis is hard to test rigorously, because you can't easily control for all the other cultural differences. But it's a very interesting idea, nonetheless. One of the most amusing things about this hypothesis is that it mirrors the difference between the English and Chinese written languages: Chinese writing is badly designed compared to alphabetic systems, to the point where there are serious effects on the literacy rate. See Moser at http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html and DeFrancis' The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, linked from http://www.pinyin.info/readings/chinese_language.html