Yuma News Now – Edmund L. Andrews
“Stanford, California – Building on new discoveries about how the brain grapples with abstract mathematics, researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education have developed a classroom strategy for teaching children the often baffling concepts surrounding negative numbers. The new strategy recruits the brain’s use of visual symmetry to make sense of the physical world, and it could have profound implications for the way elementary schools teach math. Using symmetry appears to have helped not just in teaching children about negative numbers but in improving their ability to solve higher-level math problems they haven’t seen before. Learning about negative numbers is one of the first times that kids learn about abstract numbers – it’s a gateway to more abstract learning,” said Jessica Tsang, a Stanford researcher and lead author of a new study with Daniel Schwartz and Kristen Blair of Stanford and Laura Bofferding of Purdue University.”(more)