Working children’s memory and reasoning rather than focusing on spatial rotation exercises improves children’s math skills.
- Training based on reasoning skills is the one with the greatest positive impact on math skills.
- The benefits of cognitive training could vary from simple to triple depending on the individual.
Ah, divisions, equations with two unknowns, probabilities… Many of us have been traumatized by the ruthless passage to the blackboard and the panic of not succeeding in a math problem under the watchful eyes of the teacher and from the rest of the class. But let parents be reassured: according to Swedish researchers, a few simple and fun exercises could improve the math skills of their little darlings.
This study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, was carried out on more than 17,000 Swedish schoolchildren aged six to eight who received cognitive training via an app for 20 or 33 minutes a day for a total of seven weeks. During the first week, the children went through identical exercises and then were randomly assigned to one of five training sessions.
In all groups, the children spent about half their time on mathematical tasks, such as creating number lines. The remaining time was devoted (randomly) to various exercises: mental rotation (ability to mentally rotate the image of an object in two or three dimensions), realization of tangram puzzle, exercise based on visual memory etc. The children’s mathematical performance was then tested during the first, fifth and seventh week of the study.
Better results with reasoning-based exercises
At the end of the experiment, the researchers found that all the children had improved their mathematical performance, but that training based on reasoning skills was the one with the greatest positive impact, just before that dedicated to the work of Memory.
The researchers also observed that the benefits of cognitive training could vary from one to three times depending on the individual. These results support the idea that spatial cognition training can improve academic performance and that, in mathematics, the type of training matters, the authors of this work point out.
“Given the wide range of domains associated with spatial cognition, it is possible that training transfers to multiple domains and we believe this should be included in any calculations made by teachers and policy makers about effectiveness in time terms of spatial training versus training for a particular test”, emphasizes Torkel Klingberg, who led the research.
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