December 15, 2018 Saturday
Bedtime Story
Numeracy in Children
I came across a beautiful example – yes, it
is a mathematical one – that I would like to share with you to explain in more
vivid detail how depth of understanding can vary among individuals and also
within an individual at various times of his life as he grows and matures.
Let us consider a very simple mathematical
operation of multiplication of integers with which all of us are intimately
familiar and let us see what different levels of understanding can be made out
in this very banal topic.
We shall consider only human ape here and
see on average how its understanding on this subject evolves as he grows into an
adult.
A very small child who is someone between
newborn and 3-years of age is most likely to have no understanding of
multiplication.
But if he is from a modern educated urban
family where his parents talk to him and themselves about his future he might
get an inkling of multiplication as something to do with a subject called
mathematics that he will be taught in his future schooling days.
You may argue that this cannot be called
understanding when the little child is factually ignorant of it.
But an understanding of one’s ignorance or
appreciation of one’s limitations of current knowledge is also considered by
psychologists as a type of understanding.
This is in contrast to the Dunning-Kruger
effect where average apes that are less educated and more ignorant possess a
bias of illusionary superiority over others.
This was borne out in a study conducted by
two American social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger and published
in a 1999 paper titled “Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in
Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.
It was published in the ‘Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology’ of the American Psychological Association.
Majority of such small children of average
parenting and of average socioeconomic status of mothers with average education
are highly likely to be lacking numeracy.
Numeracy is the ability to reason and apply
this reasoning into simple numerical operations or rather concepts.
Basic numeracy skills consist of not only
in the ability to perform the four basic mathematical operations but also to be
able to comprehend them.
From basic numeracy skills few manage to
advance to substantive numeracy that include number sense, operation sense,
computation, measurement, geometry, probability and statistics.
The idea of number sense is very
interesting.
Number Sense is a relatively new term in
mathematics education that is not very easy to define.
One way to state the idea of number sense
is that it is a conceptual framework of number information that allows a person
to understand numbers rather than merely use it.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Advertisements
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
No comments:
Post a Comment