NPR – Eric Westervelt
“Parents who are uneasy about their own math skills often worry about how best to teach the subject to their kids. Well … there’s an app for that. Tons of them, in fact. And a study published today in the journal Science suggests that at least one of them works pretty well for elementary school children and math-anxious parents. A team from the University of Chicago used a demographically diverse group of first-graders and their parents — nearly 600 in all — across a wide swath of Chicago. One group got to use an iPad app called Bedtime Math, built by a nonprofit with the same name. (The app is also available for Android, but we’re told most used the iPad version) The no-frills app uses stories and sound effects to present kids with math problems that they can solve with their parents. The control group was given a reading app with similar stories but no math problems to solve. The results at the end of the school year? I reached out to University of Chicago psychology professor Sian L. Beilock, one of the paper’s lead authors, to find out more.”(more)