David Geary

Yeah, there are a lot of people who write off math.

It's a very abstract field.

It takes a lot of repetition, a lot of thinking, a lot of practice.

A lot of that is dull.

So, you know, people run into roadblocks and instead of kind of doubling down on their efforts, they kind of give up on it and write it off and try not to think too much about it.

But there's long-term consequences to that if

Yeah, yeah, great question.

So in an earlier longitudinal study, we followed kids through two years of preschool, kindergarten, and through the end of first grade.

And our goal was to try to identify the basic number, knowledge, and skills that predict readiness to learn math at the beginning of first grade.

Because we know from other studies, and other people do as well, that if kids start behind, right at the beginning of first grade,

they're likely to stay behind throughout their career.

So something is going on very early on.

So in this first study, we identified the core knowledge that is important for kids to know early in the preschool years.

And that's a conceptual understanding of number words.

So knowing that the number word three represents three things, three events or whatever of any kind, and four represents four things and so forth, seems like a simple concept to us.

And it is, but it takes kids several years to really learn the conceptual meaning of these number words and then to begin to generalize them.

It's something that chimpanzees can't do at all.

With thousands of trials, they just never have that conceptual insight.

So it seems second nature to us, but it actually isn't.

So we, in this first study, we identified that kids who had this conceptual insight earlier in the preschool years had quite a head start at the beginning of first grade.