Children good at approximate math: study

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Children who had never been taught addition or subtraction were able to solve approximate math problems involving large numbers, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that reveals a new understanding of children's innate math ability.

They said children's early struggles with math may be linked to the need to produce a precise number. Their finding could lead to better ways to teach math to young children.

Writing in the journal Nature, Camilla Gilmore of the University of Nottingham, Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University and colleagues conducted a series of experiments with 5- and 6-year-old children from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds.

"I was astonished," said Spelke, who expected to find just the opposite.

"Clearly, the number words have to be learned and the Arabic notation has to be learned. These things aren't built into us, but I do think there is a basic nonsymbolic sense of number that is built into us," she said in a telephone interview.

Spelke said researchers have known for some time that adults, children, infants and animals have a sense of number.

What surprised them was that children who had learned their numbers could draw on this ability when presented with problems in symbolic arithmetic.

"We didn't think they would be able to do it," she said.

In one experiment, children were read simple statements and a question: "Sarah has 64 candies. She gives 13 of them away. John has 34 candies. Who has more?" These were accompanied by simple faces and numbers.

Most of the children (65 percent) were able to solve the problems without resorting to guessing or other means of calculation, and the finding could not have been the result of chance, the researchers said.

To see whether the children were drawing on prior knowledge of addition they may have learned at home or elsewhere, the researchers asked them to produce the exact solution, which they were not able to do.

They said teachers in the classroom-based study were skeptical about the experiment and surprised by their students' success and how much they enjoyed participating.

The authors said their study might be useful for teaching math to young kids.

"It may help children who are at a point of getting discouraged," Spelke said.