Maths-Whizzers are Focussed Thinkers
Traditional intelligence isn’t everything when it comes to maths; a new study has found that ‘executive function’ - attention span and mental self-regulation - is fundamental to academic success, especially in maths.
The paper, featured in the March/April edition of the journal Child Development and reported in this week’s Scientific American, looked over a hundred and forty American kindergarten students. The authors looked at mental processes that come under the general heading of ‘executive function’ and that don’t feature in traditional descriptions of academic ability - ‘working memory’ and ‘inhibitory control’.
Working memory is where you keep information or instructions as you perform a task, whilst inhibitory control is all about the brain’s ability to ignore or suppress automatic responses to certain tasks. Learning a new approach to a problem involves keeping in mind that new method, whilst suppressing a tendency towards the old method.
Maths-whizzers are more likely to be good at both these mental tricks, helping them use existing methods in new ways to solve problems. These skills are especially useful in maths because of the number of ways of approaching any particular problem. The Scientific American piece gives the example of students moving from repeated addition to multiplication - children have to inhibit their tendency to count up (”…two, four, six, etc…”) and use the new multiplication method.
Adele Diamond, Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, said this research:
…suggests that if we can improve executive function, we can improve their academic performance.
It was surprising that the importance of executive function was obvious in children as young as three or four, and the authors argued that young learners could be trained to improve these skills with particular tests. Clancy Blair, the paper’s lead author, gave the example of the ‘backward digit span’ test - repeating a list of numbers spoken by someone else, in reverse order.
A classic test of inhibitory control is the ‘Stroop Test’ - a test of the ability to ignore obvious, powerful, tendencies when answering questions about colour. Basically, colour words appear (’red’, ‘blue’, ‘green’, etc.) but the letters are coloured also. Sometimes the colours match the words, sometimes they differ. The test asks you to give the colour of the letters only. People are almost always slower when the colour words don’t match the colour of the text - but, of course, only if they can read the words! There’s an online explanation of the Stroop test here, and you can test yourself here.
Tests of executive function are all the rage at the moment, as the popularity of the ‘Brain Training’ games (for the Nintendo DS portable console) have shown. Many Maths-Whizz animated exercises also touch on similar skills. A number of exercises require the kind of clear-headed quick thinking which tests executive function and forces students to use more efficient ways of answering questions. The variety of learning styles in the different topics exposes them to those different mathematical methods that they can apply to the exam-style questions and the rapid recall tests.
If you have any ideas about how we can add this kind of executive function training to the games in students’ online shops, or in the Maths-Whizz exercises, do get in touch - we’re always adding new content - please respond in the comments below!
links:
Blackwell Synergy - Child development
Scientific American - Attention span and reasoning may get higher marks than intelligence, especially in math