Join the Center for Math Education for their upcoming colloquia with Harvard’s Dr. Elizabeth Spelke. Lunch provided from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM.
From the Lab to the Field: Educational Interventions Built on Core Knowledge
All seven systems are present at birth and function throughout life, in children and adults in all tested cultures. Nevertheless, many children struggle with the symbolic systems that are taught in school and that underpin learning of reading and mathematics. Here I will present the results of three large-scale randomized controlled field experiments in India, evaluating the efficacy of play-based educational interventions that build on core knowledge to enhance children’s learning of mathematics. The interventions were effective when they were played by groups of children together, and when they paired the numerals, figures, symbols and operations of mathematics with images that elicit core knowledge of number and geometry. I will suggest reasons for these effects and describe current efforts in India to develop similar games for enhancing children’s literacy. Children may be the most prodigious learners on earth: With little to no instruction, they master the commonsense concepts and skills that their culture requires, and then they go on, in school, to master highly demanding symbolic skills and systems of knowledge beyond both intuition and perception. How do they do this? Research on human infants, children, adults, and non-human animals, using diverse methods from the cognitive, brain, and computational sciences, provides evidence for seven early emerging cognitive systems: six systems of core knowledge that are shared with other animals and support children’s spontaneous learning about places, objects, animate beings, social beings, number and geometry, and a seventh system that likely is unique to humans and underlies learning of
About: Dr. Elizabeth Spelke is the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and an investigator at the NSF-MIT Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. Her laboratory focuses on the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, including capacities for formal mathematics, for constructing and using symbols, and for developing comprehensive taxonomies of objects. She probes the sources of these capacities primarily through behavioral research on human infants and preschool children, focusing on the origins and development of their understanding of objects, actions, people, places, number, and geometry. In collaboration with computational cognitive scientists, she aims to test computational models of infants’ cognitive capacities. In collaboration with economists, she has begun to take her research from the laboratory to the field, where randomized controlled experiments can serve to evaluate interventions, guided by research in cognitive science, that seek to enhance young children’s learning.