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NEW YORK - FRUSTRATED maths students may have a good excuse - some of the teaching methods meant to make maths more relevant may in fact be making it harder to understand, according to US researchers.
The researchers argued that maths concepts taught in abstract symbols and various formulae register better than when taught with real-world examples.
They said students who were taught abstract maths concepts fared better in experiments than those taught with real-world examples, such as story problems.
Adding extraneous details makes it hard for students to extract the basic mathematical concepts and apply them to new problems, they said.
'We're really making it difficult for students because we are distracting them from the underlying maths,' said Dr Jennifer Kaminski of Ohio State University, whose study appears in the journal Science.
The findings cast doubt on the widely used practice of using concrete examples to teach abstract maths concepts.
For example, a teacher might use a bag of coloured marbles to explain probability, or teach a formula about distance with the classic example of two trains departing from different cities and travelling at different speeds.
'The danger with teaching using this example is that many students only learn how to solve the problem with the trains,' Dr Kaminski said.
To find out the best methods of teaching basic maths concepts, the researchers conducted several experiments using college students in which some students were taught concepts using basic symbols while others were taught with concrete examples.
For example, they studied different approaches to teaching commutativity - that you can switch the order of elements and still get the same answer, as in 3 + 2 or 2 + 3 equals 5.
Some students learned the concepts using generic symbols. Others were taught with examples such as pictures of measuring cups filled with liquid, or slices of pizza in a container.
While all of the students were able to master these concepts easily, the students who first learned maths concepts using abstract symbols were better able to transfer that learning to other problems when tested.
That is not to say story problems should disappear.
'Story problems aren't out, but they are probably not the way we want to go about introducing concepts or problem solving,' Dr Kaminski said, adding they could be the best way to test if a student has mastered a concept.
Other mathematicians called the findings interesting but warned against over-generalising. 'One size can't fit all,' said Dr Douglas Clements of the State University of New York in Buffalo.
REUTERS, NEW YORK TIMES
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