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This is shared from recent email and highlights the 2023 Week of inspirational maths tasks which are based on the concept of “groupitizing.”
“Groupitizing” is a term coined by Bruce McCandiss of Stanford University, a neuroscientist who focuses his work on education and learning.
Bruce and his team have produced some interesting research evidence showing that the way students group dots and see numbers predicts their future achievement in maths.
Prior to this work by Dr. McCandliss and his team, researchers and educators had noted the importance of what is known as “subitizing.” This is a practice that humans naturally do – looking at a group of dots, or objects, up to 4, and knowing how many there are, without counting them.
The ability to subitize starts before our tamariki start school and develops through the years.
“Groupitizing” is the ability to group a collection of dots using the process of subitizing. For example, if someone saw the visual on the left below and were asked how many dots there are, they might say there are 10, as they see groups of 4, and 4 and 2. They may see these in different ways.
In doing this, they would be “groupitizing.” The data that Dr. McCandliss and his colleagues collected showed that in a study of over 1,200 students in grades 3-8, the extent to which students could “groupitize” predicted their performance on standardized maths tests.
As students learn to groupitize, from seeing dots visually, they are developing mental models that they likely return to every time they think about numbers. To help teachers develop this mental model, Jo Boaler and the youcubed team have created tasks for WIM 2023 that emphasize groupitizing for students in grades 1-14
- So Many Visuals (Grades 1-4)
- Area Design (Grades 3-5)
- Flipping Votes (Grades 3-5)
- Flipping Votes (Grades 6-8)
- Dots on the Grid (Grades 9-14)
For ECE, they recommend Which is More? a task that encourages groupitizing.
Eight years ago Youcubed launched the first Week of Inspirational Maths (WIM), tasks and videos about maths and mindset. Since the launch in 2015 there have been over 3 million downloads.
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