Maths skills lack transfer
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Research suggests real-world maths skills do not always transfer to the classroom.
A study conducted in India has found that children who work as market vendors develop strong real-world arithmetic skills but struggle with school-based maths.
The research, which surveyed 1,436 working children in Kolkata and Delhi, showed that they could perform complex arithmetic operations in market transactions but had difficulty solving similar problems when presented in an abstract school format.
Researchers tested the children by making purchases from their market stalls, asking for calculations involving different quantities and prices.
The majority of them could correctly compute the total cost and change due without using paper or calculators. When presented with hypothetical market-related maths problems, more than half could still answer correctly.
However, when given school-style arithmetic problems, such as written division and subtraction exercises, only a small fraction performed well.
In contrast, a group of 471 schoolchildren with no market experience performed better on school-based problems but struggled with real-world applications.
While 56 per cent correctly answered a simple abstract division problem, only 1 per cent could correctly solve a practical market problem that involved multiple steps - something more than a third of the working children had no trouble with.
The study found that schoolchildren relied heavily on inefficient written methods, such as repeated addition instead of multiplication. Even when placed in a pretend market setting, most of them continued using pen and paper and took significantly longer to arrive at answers.
Researchers noted that “schools must bridge the gap between formal and intuitive maths” to improve mathematical understanding across different contexts.
The study's authors argue that introducing mathematics in a way that builds on children’s intuitive, practical knowledge could improve overall numeracy and help transfer skills between different learning environments.
The full study is accessible here.
