A new classroom strategy uses visual symmetry to teach children the often baffling concepts surrounding negative numbers.
Further, using symmetry appears to have helped not just in teaching children about negative numbers but also in improving their ability to solve higher-level math problems they haven’t seen before.
“Learning about negative numbers is one of the first times that kids learn about abstract numbers—it’s a gateway to more abstract learning,” says Jessica Tsang, a researcher at Stanford University.
Visual Symmetry
Published in the journal Cognition & Instruction, the study marks the latest and most concrete result of a five-year project that bridges the gap between new insights from neuroscience and the testing of new classroom teaching tools for fourth-graders in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Researchers have long thought that the brain harnesses and adapts “perceptuo-motor” capacities to make sense of abstract ideas.
