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+--- Thread: Educational community: Does a Cartoon Penguin Make Math Education Great Again? (/thread-3229.html)
Educational community: Does a Cartoon Penguin Make Math Education Great Again? - C C - Jan 13, 2017
http://m.nautil.us/blog/does-a-cartoon-penguin-make-math-education-great-again
EXCERPT: [...] In the nearly two decades since the Institute was set up, ST Math has been rolled out across 45 states in the United States, and is being used by over a million K-12 students. JiJi, the cartoon penguin that leads children on their wordless journey through ST Math, has apparently helped double, sometimes even triple, growth in math proficiency in participating classes. Evaluations such as the independent assessment carried out by educational research agency WestEd appear to confirm the program’s positive effects.
The key to the ST Math’s success, according to its creators, is that it is unencumbered by the constraints of language. Words and symbols are kept to a minimum, with shapes and pictures used instead to represent concepts as abstract as quadratic equations, and informative feedback helping children to understand when and how they have gone wrong. In his 2011 TEDx talk, Peterson emphasizes the benefits their methods can have for kids speaking English as a second language or those who, like him, have language-learning difficulties. But he also stresses that he wants the program to be universal. “The idea worth spreading here is that all students, not just those with special needs, can benefit profoundly from opportunities to learn without any words at all,” he says.
It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is....