For any type of learner, a key question is brain development: When are a child’s cognitive skills able to handle abstract reasoning? Piaget believed children become capable of logic by age eleven or twelve. Ana Sušac and her colleagues at the University of Zagreb suggest that the development from concrete to more abstract thinking may occur in late adolescence, when the prefrontal cortex, associated with abstract mathematical reasoning, more fully matures. Their research suggests that, at the very least, we’re teaching algebra too early and too fast, that the road from concrete to abstract
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