儿童的数学能力.docVIP

儿童的数学能力 Childrens Numerical Skills 　　People appear to be born to compute. The numerical skills of children develop so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an internal clock of mathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long after learning to walk and talk, they can set the table with impressive accuracy —— one knife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs. Soon they are capable of noting that they have placed five knives, spoons and forks on the table and, a bit later, that this amounts to fifteen pieces of silverware. Having thus mastered addition, they move on to subtraction. It seems almost reasonable to expect that if a child were secluded on a desert island at birth and retrieved seven years later, he or she could enter a second-grade mathematics class without any serious problems of intellectual adjustment. 　　Of course, the truth is not so simple. This century, the work of cognitive psychologists has illuminated the subtle forms of daily learning on which intellectual progress depends. Children were observed as they slowly grasped —— or, as the case might be, bumped into —— concepts that adults take for granted, as they refused, for instance, to concede that quantity is unchanged as water pours from a short stout glass into a tall thin one. Psychologists have since demonstrated that young children, asked to count the pencils in a pile, readily report the number of blue or red pencils, but must be coaxed into finding the total. Such studies have suggested that the rudiments of mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort. They have also suggested that the very concept of abstract numbers - the idea of a oneness, a twoness, a threeness that applies to any class of objects and is a prerequisite for doing anything more mathematically demanding than setting a table - is itself far from innate. 　　儿童的数学能力 　　人似乎生来就会计算。 孩子们使用数字的技能发展得如此之早和如此必然，很容易让人想象有一个内在的精确而成熟的数字钟在指导他们的成长。 孩子们在学会走路和说话后不久，就能以令人惊叹的准确布置桌子——五把椅子前面分别摆上一把刀、一个汤匙、一把叉子。 很快地，