Study finds a new way to boost math ability

Playing a simple game improves 5-year-olds’ performance on tests

Parents whose children struggle with math may have new reason to be hopeful: A recent study at the Johns Hopkins University suggests that young people can improve their performance by carrying out a few simple computer exercises unrelated to numbers or math symbols.

A team of researchers in the university’s department of psychological and brain sciences found that 5-year-olds who played a five-minute computer game — and played it in a particular way — scored significantly higher than their peers on a given set of math problems.

Instead of asking the children to work with numbers, the game required them to work with pictures of blue and yellow dots — targeting the kids’ “intuitive number sense” rather than any knowledge of math they might possess.

The findings are noteworthy because they suggest that a simple method actually exists for quickly improving children’s math performance — and that it might work because it targets a brain function rarely associated with this area of learning.

“It’s not the case that if you’re bad at math, you’re bad at it the rest of your life. It’s not only changeable, it can be changeable in a very short period of time,” said Jinjing “Jenny” Wang, a doctoral student in the Krieger School of Arts and Science’s department of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins and the study’s lead author.

“Our key claim is that we can change children’s math performance by working with their intuitive number sense — a capacity each of us is born with, not something we have to learn,” she said.

An article on the findings appears in the July issue of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Neuroscientists have long drawn a distinction between the intellectual capacities that all humans possess at birth and those we acquire through learning and study.

The first set of skills — called primary cognitive skills — include humans’ innate sense of quantity, a capacity they share with many animals, including monkeys and rats. Studies have shown, for example, that infants given a choice between a plate that holds a few crackers and a plate with many more crackers will gravitate toward the plate with more.

They have yet to learn numbers, but they possess what cognitive-development researchers call “approximate number sense.”

The second set of cognitive skills are those that must be learned and practiced — a grasp of numbers, for example, or the ability to add, subtract, divide and multiply those numbers.

People generally believe that children must practice math problems similar to those they will see on a test in order to get better at math in school.

Wang’s team took a different approach, testing whether exercising children’s approximate number sense, not their learned abilities, would help them perform better in math. It did. “Interestingly, this new study shows that boosting children’s reliance on this intuitive understanding at least temporarily improves their performance on a standardized math test,” said Melissa Libertus, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies children’s cognitive