Group items tagged

"If a 6-month-old can distinguish between 20 dots and 10 dots, she's more likely to be a good at math in preschool. That's the conclusion of a new study, which finds that part of our proficiency at addition and subtraction may simply be something we're born with."

Statistics that lie! This is a great example of data that isn't reported correctly. The article decries the death of Netbooks, when in fact it is more about a stabalization of sales. I encourage math teachers to let students read the article and at least the first two responses. It's a great example of blatant misinformation. 

From the abstract (full text requires subscription): "Many organisms can predict future events from the statistics of past experience, but humans also excel at making predictions by pure reasoning: integrating multiple sources of information, guided by abstract knowledge, to form rational expectations about novel situations, never directly experienced. Here, we show that this reasoning is surprisingly rich, powerful, and coherent even in preverbal infants. When 12-month-old infants view complex displays of multiple moving objects, they form time-varying expectations about future events that are a systematic and rational function of several stimulus variables. Infants' looking times are consistent with a Bayesian ideal observer embodying abstract principles of object motion. The model explains infants' statistical expectations and classic qualitative findings about object cognition in younger babies, not originally viewed as probabilistic inferences."

Description of a University of Queensland study involving 36 infants, half 15 months and half 18 months. Tests with counting videos suggests that the 18 month old children have a grasp of counting rules before they can count (for example, understanding that objects can be counted only once." Further research using brain imaging is suggested.

Thanks - this will be useful for my "Math-rich baby" online class!