The PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) is an assessment of the mathematics, reading, and science ability of 16-year-old students worldwide. In 2018, the top 7 mathematics scores went to regions that either spoke Chinese (China, Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong, Taiwan) or use the Chinese alphabet (South Korea and Japan). The United States is 37th (1).
Why is this happening? Is there something special about these countries' schools or their parenting skills? Or is it “permissiveness” in the West, blah blah blah. Or is it the near-universal use of the abacus? There might be something to that but calculator use is rising and test scores aren't going down. There is another possibility. Proposed by Stanislas Debaene in the book: The Number Sense, in 1997 (2), the idea is that the Chinese language, in particular the way Chinese represents numbers, gives children a cognitive advantage in learning mathematics. For instance, to count from 1 to 99,999 a speaker of Chinese needs only 13 words while a speaker of English or French needs 29. In addition, languages such as French or German have syntactic twists that add more cognitive burden to speakers of the language. A speaker of English can memorize on average about 7 consecutive digits while a speaker of Chinese can memorize 9. This is because the Chinese words for the 9 digits are shorter and more differentiated than in English. Another example of this is that an English speaker at age 4 on average can count to 15 while a Chinese speaker of the same age can count to 40.
Why does this matter? In 1202 Fibonacci of Piza introduced indo/Arabic numerals and algebra to Europe. This kicked off a great flowering of European mathematics because these numerals were much more efficient than Roman numerals. In the history of mathematics changes in symbolism have brought dynamic changes in understanding. Look at a calculus text in the 1930s and there are no drawings whatsoever while now the advent of computer graphics has led to an explosion of visualization and new interest in geometry. Simpler symbols for numbers worked, maybe we need simpler names for numbers also. So teach your babies the Chinese names for numbers along with your local language. Babies can learn multiple languages easily.
“PISA 2018 Worldwide Ranking - Average Score of Mathematics, Science and Reading - FactsMaps.” Accessed March 8, 2020. http://factsmaps.com/pisa-2018-worldwide-ranking-average-score-of-mathematics-science-reading/.
Debaene, Stanislas. The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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