MIT Study In India Finds Kids Show Different Math Skills At Work Vs. School

Study in US: In a new study, MIT researchers have found that the Indian kids who work in retail perform calculations for transactions quickly, but their performance is not the same when they get to solve the problems taught in a classroom.

MIT researchers have conducted a study on the mathematical abilities of Indian kids. The study shows that the kids who work in retail do calculations very fast and efficiently to complete the retail transactions, but the same kids find it difficult to solve the mathematical problems taught in the classroom. These students working in retail are those who are still in school or attended schools till the 7th and 8th grades.

Interestingly, they also found that those students who are still studying in school and not working in retail or anywhere else perform well when it comes to solving school-type math problems, but they do not perform equally well when it comes to marketplace mathematics.

MIT economist Esther Duflo, co-author of the new study, says, “For the school kids, they do worse when you go from an abstract problem to a concrete problem. For the market kids, it’s the opposite.”

Abhijit Banerjee, an MIT economist and another co-author of the paper, said, "Indeed, the kids with jobs who are also in school underperform despite being extraordinarily good at mental math. That, for me was always the revelation that the one doesn’t translate into the other.”

Details Of MIT Study On Indian Kids' Maths Ability

The research was conducted through three data-collection exercises. In the first one, the researchers worked with 201 kids working in Kolkata markets and found their maths ability good in market transactions. Second, they conducted a study on 400 kids working in markets in Delhi and found the same results.

In the third category, the researchers conducted a study on 200 kids. They found only 10% of the non-working kids could solve the market problem.

"Finding a way to cross the divide between informal and formal ways of tackling math problems, then, could notably help some Indian children," reads an MIT statement.

Duflo adds, “We don’t want to blame the teachers. It’s not their fault. They are given a strict curriculum to follow, and strict methods to follow.”

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