Children's Number Sense Develops Earlier than Expected

June 5, 2007

Findings that children come into the world with a nascent ability to do approximate arithmetic hint at new strategies to teach mathematics, according to researchers from the University of Nottingham and Harvard University.

"We've known for some time that adults, children, and even infants and nonhuman animals have a sense of number," said Camilla Gilmore, now at Nottingham's Learning Sciences Research Institute. "We were surprised to see, however, that children spontaneously use their number sense when presented with problems in symbolic arithmetic."

The study, published in the May 31 Nature, involved five-year-old boys and girls in both a quiet "laboratory" setting and a classroom. The children were presented with a series of illustrated problems that used numbers less than 100. A subtraction problem, for example, stated: "Sarah has 64 candies and gives 13 of them away, and John has 34 candies. Who has more?"

Even though the children had not yet been taught symbolic addition and subtraction and could not provide an exact solution, they performed significantly better than if they had simply been guessing. The children were apparently able to make use of their nonsymbolic number sense to come within range of the correct answer.

The research suggests that one path to engage children in mathematics while simultaneously reducing math anxiety could involve drawing upon their innate ability to naturally comprehend the meaning of addition and subtraction.

Source: University of Nottingham, May 30; Nature, May 31