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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, ta

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 playing with semantics here?

Alex3917 18y ago
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.
- tomsaffell 18y ago
  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?
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    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.
    - tomsaffell 18y ago
      Thanks Alex. I guess I'll wait until I can get my hands on the book to find out what sources he is citing.
jgamman 18y ago
i've lost count of the number of times i've tutored my whanau and had to use some variant of 'slice a pizza into x bits and then hand out a slice to y friends - fractions are just a quick way to write it down...' simple conceptual anchor points are crucial - everything after that leverages the basics.
light3 18y ago
I agree - Gladwell has the facts right, but his theories on the reason for the facts are quite off from reality, imo. Even if it is hard to count numbers in english, it is still easy to see the pattern in numerical symbols. Either way it is certainly not a momentous task for a 4 year old to form relations words to numerical symbols, with their abundance of ability in memory. This is why Gladwell's theory falls apart - a much more likely theory is that math ability is more readily determined by HARD work or innate genius. And concerning his rice farming theory, I wouldn't know whether to laugh or take it as an insult, because to me it is that ridiculous. His claiming effectively, that farmers in China work the hardest, because they farmed rice. On how many levels does this seem inconsistent?

Alex3917 18y ago

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.

tomsaffell 18y ago
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?
- Alex3917 18y ago
  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.
  - tomsaffell 18y ago
    Thanks Alex. I guess I'll wait until I can get my hands on the book to find out what sources he is citing.

jgamman 18y ago

i've lost count of the number of times i've tutored my whanau and had to use some variant of 'slice a pizza into x bits and then hand out a slice to y friends - fractions are just a quick way to write it down...' simple conceptual anchor points are crucial - everything after that leverages the basics.

light3 18y ago

I agree - Gladwell has the facts right, but his theories on the reason for the facts are quite off from reality, imo. Even if it is hard to count numbers in english, it is still easy to see the pattern in numerical symbols. Either way it is certainly not a momentous task for a 4 year old to form relations words to numerical symbols, with their abundance of ability in memory. This is why Gladwell's theory falls apart - a much more likely theory is that math ability is more readily determined by HARD work or innate genius. And concerning his rice farming theory, I wouldn't know whether to laugh or take it as an insult, because to me it is that ridiculous. His claiming effectively, that farmers in China work the hardest, because they farmed rice. On how many levels does this seem inconsistent?