Elizabeth Spelke Quotes
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The experiments of the infants and the monkeys, I think, make it extremely likely that these abilities are inborn.
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I don't place much faith in my intuitions, except as a starting place for designing experiments.
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Rhesus monkeys as well as human adults and older children living in a remote Amazon village have been given comparison and addition tasks using arrays of dots, and they show the same abilities we find in 5- year- old Boston children.
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What our study shows is that children have a fundamental understanding of addition and of numbers and we hope to harness that ability to enhance mathematic instruction.
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A lot of children find symbolic arithmetic quite difficult and tedious, yet the children loved our tasks. They were games, the children were very happy to play them, and they were also they were good at them.
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The spontaneous understanding of geometrical concepts and maps by this remote human community provides evidence that core geometrical knowledge is a universal constituent of the human mind.
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I think it's really fascinating that geometry is so difficult. My guess is it's difficult because it focuses on proofs.
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What's central about numbers for us as adults is that we can apply a number like 7 to a diverse number of things. We can say that there are seven dots but also that a horn honks seven times. Although these are different in their sensory qualities, the numbers are the same.
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While geometrical concepts can be enriched by culture-specific devices like maps, or the terms of a natural language, underneath this variability lies a shared set of geometrical concepts. Those concepts allow adults and children with no formal education, and minimal spatial language, to categorize geometrical forms and to use geometrical relationship to represent the surrounding spatial layout.
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Our studies show these abilities are universal, and they develop in the absence of instruction. You don't need to take a class in geometry, and you don't need to learn from a teacher what a right triangle is in order to show this sensitivity.
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You see the same profile of difficulty among the educated Bostonian adults, and the going-to-school Bostonian kids, and the adults and children in the Amazon. The problems that were hard for them were hard for us.
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When children start learning math in school, they already have a basic understanding of the concepts. This understanding should guide teachers to work on enhancing these skills.
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It's not about being right, it's about getting it right.
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Knowing this, we may be able to enhance math training.