Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
A child with no sense of quantity can still learn to recite that seven and eight make fifteen, and it will be a string of sounds attached to nothing. It tends to hold up until fractions and then fall apart, by which time everyone has settled on the idea that this child is bad at maths. Going back to blocks, cups and counters with a nine year old feels like a step backwards and is very often exactly what is needed.
It is God who brought you out of your mothers' wombs knowing nothing, and gave you hearing and sight and minds (Quran 16:78). The equipment is given and the knowledge is built afterwards, which is a fair description of a child meeting quantity for the first time.
النحل
وَٱللَّهُ أَخۡرَجَكُم مِّنۢ بُطُونِ أُمَّهَٰتِكُمۡ لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ شَيۡـࣰٔ ا وَجَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرَ وَٱلۡأَفۡـِٔدَةَ لَعَلَّكُمۡ تَشۡكُرُونَ
It is God who brought you out of your mothers’ wombs knowing nothing, and gave you hearing and sight and minds, so that you might be thankful
Qur’an 16:78read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The studies gathered here are about reading and learning rather than number sense, so the honest position is that this rests on clinical reasoning more than on a trial you can point to. What the wider evidence does show, in a meta-analysis of children's executive function training, is that training a skill improves that skill and does not spread to untrained ones. That argues for practising the understanding you actually want rather than assuming it will fall out of fact drill.
Kassai R, Futo J, Demetrovics Z, Takacs ZK. (2019). A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence on the near- and far-transfer effects among children's executive function skills.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Number facts only mean something if the child can feel what the numbers stand for.
Behaviour is usually the visible end of a skill that has not been built. What you are watching in a classroom is the shape of the difficulty rather than the shape of the child.
A child who cannot bear the noise, the lights and the scratchy jumper all day will be hard to be around by the afternoon. That child usually gets described as badly behaved rather than as overwhelmed.
Some people get all the way to university before anything is named, then meet eighty pages of reading a night and cannot do it. Nothing broke that night. The volume simply outgrew a way of coping that had held for years.