Teaching gap between American & Asian math teachers

This is from the UCI website since it was done by a UCI and two UCLA researchers. (The full article was published in May 25th issue of Science.)

The upshot is the following: while both Asian and American math instructors use analogies to teach mathematics, the Asian teachers do so in a way that encourages reasoning in their students; in particular, this means that the Asian teachers "reduce the processing demands on their students." In other words, the analogies that Americans teachers give are too abstract in order to be helpful.

These findings are very interesting to me for two reasons (excluding that fact that something worthwhile came out of Education Departments), one pedagogical and the other psychological. First, as someone who teaches introductory college mathematics (from Pre-Algebra to College Algebra and statistics) this let's me know that when I use analogies (which I do), I need to make sure that I use a lot of mental and visual imagery in conjunction with arm gestures to get the analogy across. (I think I do this, at least to an extent, but I am sure that I can be better at it.) Secondly, I am investigating (on a side-research project) the different way that Asians and Westerners think. Prof Richard Nisbett has shown that East Asians are better at seeing relationships among events that Westerners. So if Nisbett is correct, which I preliminarly I believe he is at least correct to an extent, then this would match up with the aforementioned article.

The social psychological make-up of Asians allows them to think about relationships in a way that is not natural (in the sociological sense, not the biological) for Westerners and this allows them to teach mathematics in a more efficient way. It appears from the article that the instructors were teaching arithmetic, algebra, and calculus, but not geometry. If Nisbett is correct that Asians have a better intuition of arithmetic and algebra and Westerners with geometry, it might be the case that there would be different results for this study if geometry was the topics being taught.

Regardless, this is an interesting little article which has both practical and theoretical import. Although it is about mathematics and psychology (but not mathematical psychology), I thought that it would be good to talk about on this blog.