STEM Learning and Learning Environments  

Foundations of Quantitative Thought: Number, Space, Time, and Probability

Effective Years: 2016-2022

Humans have an innate ability to estimate quantities yet their intuitions often contain biases that interfere with learning new ways to think about quantity. Weaving together strands of psychology, neuroscience, economics, and education, researchers at Wesleyan University and Boston College shed light on the cognitive processes underlying our abilities to estimate 4 kinds of quantities: number, space, time, and probability. By comparing processes across these four distinct areas, the researchers aim to provide a unifying account of how children and adults estimate quantities, which has the potential to transform current understanding of the cognitive bases of how people learn in and across STEM disciplines. Achieving a simple unifying account is important because the ability to think well about quantity in all of these areas is fundamental to STEM learning. Other educational benefits include the establishment of partnerships with local museums that allow the research team to collect data from a diverse population while also supporting the museum's public education efforts. This project also contributes to STEM workforce development by training undergraduate students through a service-learning course offered at Wesleyan, and through a summer research internship exchange across the two universities. These aspects of the project, taken with its robust theoretical grounding, well-formulated research questions and tests of competing models of how people reason about quantity in childhood and adulthood, demonstrate its potential to guide and improve the design of STEM learning environments for all citizens.

This project exemplifies the Education and Human Resources Core Research program's commitment to fundamental research on learning in STEM that combines theory, techniques, and perspectives from a wide range of disciplines and contexts. Specifically, it aims to provide a unifying account of how children and adults estimate quantities across four distinct domains: the development of numerical estimation; spatial categorization (remembering the location of items in space); the theoretical neuroscience of time processing (reproducing temporal durations); and decision making under risk (the processing of probabilities). Through a series of behavioral studies with adults and children, the researchers will test their hypothesis that proportion judgment underlies basic quantity estimation across these domains, across development, and across contexts (varying task constraints). This work is important because -- despite striking similarities in behaviors described across research in these literatures -- each one conceptualizes them quite differently, positing different accounts of the underlying mechanisms that yield quantity judgments. The project will advance and potentially transform our understanding of mental representations and processes involved in quantity judgments while also providing insight into how quantity biases may influence the processing of numerical information in educational contexts and real-life decisions. In this way the project builds a coherent, cumulative knowledge base, focusing on high-leverage topics.