by Daniel LaPonsie at Psychology Punk (psychologypunk.com) 

Looking back at my grade school years, I can now see that I grew up in an odd time. The early 80s were a time of rather awkward transitions between old and new technologies.

The Apple computer had been invented and was taking off in a big way–we had one in our Catholic grade school, and teachers allowed school children to take turns running educational software at it throughout each and every week. Portable calculators had become both affordable and highly portable so that by the mid-80s, school children had wrist watches with little calculators in them.

Yet, an abacus could be found in many of the classrooms and many of my classmates knew how to use one. I recall a couple of classmates could really fly through equations with dizzying speed.

The ‘mental abacus’

Some educators are currently re-discovering the relevance and usefulness of the abacus and instructing children in how to use them. however, after these children reach a particular level of skill in using them, those educators take it a step further. They instruct their students to visualize the progression of the problem–and have the children work things using a “mental abacus.”

The technique apparently works incredibly well. Some children are able to work through multi-step problems faster than you or I would with the aid of a calculator.

The “mental abacus” has caught on enough that researchers have conducted a study into it–the results of which were published in a paper in Child Development, titled “Learning Mathematics in a Visuospatial Format: A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Mental Abacus Instruction.”

Two of this paper’s authors–David Barner and Michael C. Frank–have been fascinated by the “mental abacus” for years, and had a previous paper published on this subject in 2011.

About the latest study

“Learning Mathematics in a Visuospatial Format” details a three-year trial that was conducted at a school in India on 183 young children. The results suggested that training children in this technique could promote impressive benefits, in the number-crunching department.

The study looked at a couple of related questions: Does this technique also promote development of other cognitive abilities; and does it promote a more favorable attitude toward math? The answer to both was no. Which is a bummer.

However, as Christian Jarrett pointed out in a write-up at BPS Research Digest on this study, those disappointing findings do have a positive aspect. They mean that the boost in math ability that was documented at the end of the three year trial was probably not due to a placebo effect, because those kids became more skilled at doing arrhythmic thanks to this method, yet they still pretty-much hated it. That’s significant.

If you’d like to see students using this technique, check out this astounding video: