Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rice Paddies And Math Tests

gladwell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#31

Post by yagiz »

eru wrote: post #21
epoweripi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the comment above. But there is a large rural population in India that 'thinks numbers' in the native language. May be the article is true only for numbers in the CJK (Chinese-Japense-Korean) languages. Atleast in the 3 Indian languages I know, numbers are bad in all of them - as bad as it is in English.

Turkish is good in this respect. They even have have regular numbers from 11 to 19.

Yes, but the decades are not related to digits. Two is "iki" while twenty is "yirmi".

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#32

Post by xiaoma »

DaniFong wrote: post #24
xiaoma wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinyin.info is largely devoted to an anti-character crusade that doesn't represent mainstream academic thought. Mark, if you're reading this, I don't mean any disrespect to the work you've put into making the resource it is. I've sent many people there for the rules on pinyin punctuation and spacing. DeFrancis was the undisputed pre-eminent sinologist of his time, however many of the literacy claims are unfounded. Th…

Taiwan is also mostly urban, whereas the literacy rate in China is reduced by those from rural, far flung provinces.

That's why comparing China with developed countries and blaming any literacy shortcomings on orthography just isn't fair.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#33

Post by DaniFong »

xiaoma wrote: post #32
DaniFong wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taiwan is also mostly urban, whereas the literacy rate in China is reduced by those from rural, far flung provinces.

That's why comparing China with developed countries and blaming any literacy shortcomings on orthography just isn't fair.

Point taken.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#34

Post by tomsaffell »

Alex3917 wrote: post #9
tomsaffell wrote: post #6

Interesting 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.

I just read this paper (it took me a while to get it) and it does not make any reference to fractions at all. It only supports the first claim:

>That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children...

It does not support the second claim:

>The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily...

I don't have a copy of the book to hand (in India and haven't managed to find it yet) - I can only see the online excerpt. Does he cite other papers in support of the fractions claim and/or the second claim quoted above?

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#35

Post by Alex3917 »

tomsaffell wrote: post #34
Alex3917 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just read this paper (it took me a while to get it) and it does not make any reference to fractions at all . It only supports the first claim: >That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children... It does not support the second claim: >The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can per…

He only cites secondary sources in the book. I just linked to that paper because I happened to know about it offhand. (Wrote a couple papers about it in college.)

If you want to find the paper supporting the second claim, Gladwell explicitly uses the keyword number-naming systems so that is a pretty big clue. There can only be so many cognitive development papers with that as the independent variable, so it should be pretty easy to find. It wouldn't surprise me if the research supporting the second claim was done by the same researchers who did the other paper I linked to.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#36

Post by tomsaffell »

Alex3917 wrote: post #35
tomsaffell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just read this paper (it took me a while to get it) and it does not make any reference to fractions at all . It only supports the first claim: >That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children... It does not support the second claim: >The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can per…

He only cites secondary sources in the book. I just linked to that paper because I happened to know about it offhand. (Wrote a couple papers about it in college.) If you want to find the paper supporting the second claim, Gladwell explicitly uses the keyword number-naming systems so that is a pretty big clue. There can only be so many cognitive development papers with that as the independent variable, so it should be…

Thanks Alex. I guess I'll wait until I can get my hands on the book to find out what sources he is citing.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#37

Post by eru »

yagiz wrote: post #31
eru wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turkish is good in this respect. They even have have regular numbers from 11 to 19.

Yes, but the decades are not related to digits. Two is "iki" while twenty is "yirmi".

Yes. At least it's the relation is not visible to outsiders. Perhaps there's a hidden relation?
Post reply on HN