21/08/2018

Does home math help children at school?

Reproduction from the IMPA Science & Mathematics blog, from O Globo, coordinated by Claudio Landim.

Débora Foguel , Leopoldo de Meis Institute of Medical Biochemistry – UFRJ

In this article, I chose to highlight the current positive moment for Brazilian mathematics and selected a crucial topic to attract more young people to this discipline. Just to illustrate how prominent our mathematics is, I recall that recently, a team of Brazilian students received four bronze medals and one gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Romania. Furthermore, Rio de Janeiro hosted the World Congress of Mathematicians, which, for the first time, was held in the Southern Hemisphere. I also take this opportunity to issue a challenge to my fellow mathematicians, a challenge that can be found at the end of this article. Those who get there will read it!

Between August 2nd and 4th, the first Meeting of the National Network of Science for Education (Rede CpE) took place in São Paulo. This network comprises approximately 120 Brazilian researchers from diverse fields of knowledge and regions of the country, conducting studies aimed at contributing to the improvement of education in Brazil. I don't have space here to detail what the Rede CpE, where I serve as Coordinator, does, but I invite readers to visit the website to learn more about our Network. What matters now is that, at this Meeting, we welcomed Dr. Susan C. Levine, who delivered the opening lecture. Dr. Susan is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Psychology, where she has long studied the interest of children and adolescents in mathematics. I was very impressed with her presentation and decided to choose one of Dr. Levine's works as the subject of this month's article to honor mathematics. Here I share the findings of her study published in 2015 in the journal Science (Science 350, 196-198).

In this study, Dr. Susan's group adopted a very interesting strategy to answer the question posed in the title of this article: Does developing certain mathematical concepts at home help children perform well in mathematics at school?

It is widely accepted that parents reading books aloud positively influences children's academic development. However, it had not yet been determined whether parents (I will use the term "parents" but I want to refer to those who care for the children), by interacting with their children in activities related to mathematics, could influence their learning of this subject at school. In general, most of us believe that learning mathematics is restricted to the school environment and that the family can contribute little to it. Wrong! That was the conclusion of this study conducted by Dr. Susan. Let's look at the data!

Dr. Susan's team followed the math performance of 587 children (from schools in 22 different areas of Chicago) who were learning to read and write for a year. They used a free app that playfully and simply introduces some math concepts to children of that age. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to access the app, but from what I heard in her lecture in São Paulo and from what is described in the article, the app includes activities with numbers (numerical counting), geometric shapes, spatial concepts (in front of, under, above, next to, etc.), fraction concepts, probability, and so on. The app was even designed to be used by parents who have limited math skills.

The families were divided into two groups: Group I – composed of 420 families who used the math app, and Group II – composed of 167 families who used an iPad to read stories to their children. This was called the control group, as the researchers wanted to rule out any possibility that the results were influenced by the simple interaction of parents with their children. These stories did not contain any numerical or spatial content so as not to interfere with the results.

For one year, families used either the math app or the iPad with reading activities, and the mathematical knowledge of the children in both groups was monitored by researchers trained for this purpose. Certainly, the mathematical knowledge of each child in both groups was assessed before the start of the research to serve as a reference or starting point.

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.