Remember playing Chutes and Ladders when you were little? Turns out you were boosting your math skills.
A thesis out of Carnegie Mellon University states playing a linear number board game for about one hour increased low-income five-and-a-half-year-olds' math proficiency. Carried through years of schooling, the authors suggest math improvements due to games could make a significant difference for the students.
"The present findings demonstrated that the benefits of playing number board games include enhanced understanding of numerical magnitudes, improved counting, and improved numeral identification," the study stated. "These gains are not only important in themselves but also seem likely to increase children’s ability to acquire further numerical information."
Playing a color board game (Candy Land, say) wasn't associated with a math skills boost.
"The finding that middle-income children have more experience playing board games in general, and Chutes and Ladders in particular, increased the plausibility of the related hypothesis that variations in experience with such games is one source of differences between the numerical knowledge of children from low- and middle-income backgrounds," the study added.
The full study is at: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/ramsieg-inpress1.pdf.
2 comments:
I love it. Let's all play Chutes and Ladders while breast-feeding. We'll be so smart!
I believe this about Chutes and Ladders. My oldest daughter got the game for Christmas and her addition skills have improved. She still likes Candy Land but, I think it's good, too. My younger daughter still needs to learn her colors. What better way to learn than from her older sister?
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