Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them

Benedict Carey:

Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city's poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve.

But there they were on a recent Wednesday morning, three months into the school year, counting up to seven and higher, even doing some elementary addition and subtraction. At recess, one boy, Joshua, used a pointer to illustrate a math concept known as cardinality, by completing place settings on a whiteboard.

"You just put one plate there, and one there, and one here," he explained, stepping aside as two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf. "That's it. See?"

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 22, 2009 3:22 AM
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