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Children's Numerical Skills

People appear to be born to compute. The numerical skills of childrendevelop so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an internal clockof mathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long after learning towalk and talk, they can set the table with impressive accuracy-- oneknife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs. Soon they arecapable of noting that they have placed five knives, spoons and forks on thetable and, a bit later, that this amounts to fifteen  pieces ofsilverware. Having  thus  mastered addition, they move onto subtraction.  It seems almost reasonable to expect  that if achild were secluded  on a desert  island at birth  and retrievedseven years later, he or she could enter a second-grade mathematics classwithout any serious problems of intellectual adjustment.
Of course,the truth is not so simple. This century, the work of cognitive psychologistshas illuminated  the subtle forms of daily learning on whichintellectual  progress  depends.  Children were observed as theyslowly grasped -- or, as the case might be, bumped into -- concepts thatadults take for granted, as they refused, for instance, to concede that quantityis unchanged as water pours from a short stout glass into a tall thin one. 
Psychologistshave since demonstrated that young children, asked to count the pencils in apile, readily report the number of blue or red pencils, but must be coaxedinto finding the total. Such studies have suggested that the rudimentsof mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort. They have alsosuggested that the very concept of abstract numbers - the idea of aoneness, a twoness, a threeness that applies to any class of  objects andis  a prerequisite for doing anything more  mathematically demandingthan setting a table - is itself far from innate.
　　全文翻譯：兒童的數(shù)學能力
　　人似乎生來就會計算。  孩子們使用數(shù)字的技能發(fā)展得如此之早和如此必然，很容易讓 人想象有一個內(nèi)在的精確而成熟的數(shù)字鐘在指導他們的成長。  
　　孩子們在學會走路和說話后 不久，就能以令人驚嘆的準確布置桌子--五把椅子前面分別擺上一把刀、一個湯匙、一把叉子。  很快地，他們就能知道他們已在桌面上擺放了五把刀、五個湯匙、五把叉子。  沒有多 久，他們就又能知道這些東西加起來總共是 15 把銀餐具。 
　　如此這般地掌握了加法之后，他 們又轉(zhuǎn)向減法。  有一種設(shè)想幾乎順理成章，那就是，即使一個孩子一出生就被隔絕到荒島上，七年后返回世間，也能直接上小學二年級的數(shù)學課，而不會碰到任何智力調(diào)整方面的大 麻煩。當然，事實并沒有這么簡單。  
　　本世紀認知心理學家的工作已經(jīng)揭示了智力發(fā)展所依 賴的日常學習的微妙形式。  他們觀察到孩子們緩慢掌握那些成年人認為理所當然的概念的 過程，或者是孩子們偶然遇到這些概念的過程。  他們也觀察到孩子們拒絕承認某些常識的 情況。 比如： 孩子們拒絕承認當水從短而粗的瓶中倒入細而長的瓶子中時，水的數(shù)量沒有 變化。  心理學家們而后又展示一個例子， 即：讓孩子們數(shù)一堆鉛筆時，他們能順利地報出 藍鉛筆或紅鉛筆的數(shù)目，但卻需誘導才能報出總的數(shù)目。  此類研究表明：數(shù)學基礎(chǔ)是經(jīng)過 逐漸努力后掌握的。  
　　他們還表示抽象的數(shù)字概念，如可表示任何一類物品并且是在做比擺 桌子有更高數(shù)學要求的任何事時都必備的一、二、三意識，遠遠不是天生就具備的。

 

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