Good mathematicians are made, not born

Washington – Researchers have said that if one wants to be good at all types of math, they need to practice them all, and can’t trust their innate natural talent to do most of the job for them.

The researchers tested the math skills of 70 Norwegian fifth graders, aged 10.5 years on average. Their results suggest that it is important to practice every single kind of math subject to be good at all of them, and that these skills aren’t something you are born with.

Professor Hermundur Sigmundsson at Department of Psychology said that they found support for a task specificity hypothesis, asserting that they become good at exactly what they practice.

Nine types of math tasks were tested, from normal addition and subtraction, both orally and in writing, to oral multiplication and understanding the clock and the calendar.

The results have been published in Psychological Reports.