What is 29 + 14?
Some readers may solve the problem procedurally: line up the two numbers, add the ones column, carry the one, and add the tens to get 43. Others may instead notice a creative shortcut: 29 + 14 is the same as 30 + 13, a much easier sum to calculate. Recent studies show that the less likely someone is to use procedural solutions, the better they tend to be at more abstract problem solving – and gender is a significant predictor.
In a new study, researchers asked a group of 213 students from a high school in the Midwest in the United States to do three math problems. Only 18 percent of the boys used the procedural method for all three questions, compared to 52 percent of the girls. And those who rarely used a procedural algorithm were significantly more likely to succeed on problem-solving questions.
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“Honestly, (the results) blew me away,” said Indiana University Bloomington mathematics education researcher Sarah Lubienski, a co-author of the study, published in British Journal of Educational Psychology. They are “the most interesting discoveries of my career,” she adds. And that was before Lubienski and one of her co-authors realized that another group had reached nearly identical conclusions in a similar study of 810 American adults. The researchers decided to team up for a two-study task. “Together, we felt it was a pretty compelling argument that we need to pay more attention to how people approach computation from a young age,” says Lubienski.
The team found that students who reported a greater desire to please their teachers, a trait skewed heavily toward women, were more likely to solve problems procedurally—that is, the way the teacher instructed them to. This tendency may contribute to a long-standing paradox in math education: girls often have better math grades than boys, and girls and boys perform similarly on state assessments, but girls lag on high-stakes testing like the SAT and beyond, especially with tasks that involve solving problems they’ve never seen before. The same eagerness that helps girls get ahead in school can hold them back later. The researchers also found that creative problem solving was correlated with stronger spatial skills, specifically being able to rotate objects in one’s mind — an ability that Lubienski says can be learned.
“What I think is exciting is that (the paper) points to potentially malleable mechanisms — not just ‘girls do X, boys do Y,’ but why these differences might emerge,” said New York University education researcher Joseph Cimpian, who was not involved in either study. “The problem may not be ability, but rather the interplay between instruction, classroom norms, anxiety, and what students believe is expected of them.”
Even if you’re no longer in high school, it’s never too late to improve your problem-solving skills and practice thinking outside the box, says Lubienski. “Try to solve math puzzles in Scientific American“, she suggests.
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