Eileen

That's wonderful because that means now both groups of kids are learning a lot of math content and can solve problems.

Fantastic.

You could stop there.

A traditional education would stop there saying, OK, so both school systems are effective at teaching kids math.

We're done.

But you would be missing something very important.

And I suspect that this is what Chris was getting at.

When we looked again, we could see that whereas the two groups of kids got the same number of problems right, the Montessori kids got far more wrong.

That's because they didn't skip the things they weren't sure of.

They took a whirl and just tried.

And when they got it wrong, they engaged brain networks that showed that they were trying to make sense of what had happened and were actively grappling with the mathematical content.

And then the next time they saw a problem like that one, they were more likely to get it right.

The traditionally schooled kids, by contrast, when they saw something that they got right, their brains showed activity patterns that suggested they were trying to remember that.

It's as if they were saying like, oh, that's right, quick, store that to memory so you can do it again just the same way.

When they got something wrong, we didn't see this kind of active grappling.

And in turn, we saw a longer pause as if they were sort of freaking out a little bit.

And then when they saw the same kind of problem again, they were not more likely to get it right.

They got it wrong over and over again.

When you feel like the goal of math class is to solve a problem and someone else knows the answer and I give it to them and then they tell me, that is a certain way of privileging and emoting about the process.

You have emotions about correct and incorrect answers, right?