Two years later, the children were brought back to the laboratory and were given a number of tests of academic achievement that included a test of mathematical achievement. What O’Neill found was that those children who scored highly on the mathematics test had also scored highly on certain measures of their storytelling ability two years earlier.
“It was only certain aspects of storytelling that were related to later mathematical ability. Most strongly predictive of children’s mathematical performance was their ability to relate all the different events in the story, to shift clearly from the actions of one character to another, and to adopt the perspective of different characters and talk about what they were feeling or thinking,” explained O’Neill.
—UW researcher links storytelling and mathematical ability (Eureka Alert (press release))
My English-major brain is reeling with puns on “perspective” and “story problems.” While I’ve only read the press release, and not the full academic article, I wonder whether there will be anything in it to shed light on the narratology vs. ludology debate in computer games studies.
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You're right, Will... at least this press release named the journal where the full study appears.
As for the spam, I was as surprised as you were!
mmm I do hate it though, when people take stuff like this and use it to say:
We need to teach kids more math, because obviously that will improve their storytelling.
Not that the people who wrote this article are doing that - but someone else often comes along and does it for them, using their article.
fyi It's kinda funny that you decided to say "UW Researcher", as it's really "University of Waterloo Researcher" (not University of Wisconsin).
And another thing - where's all the spam I was looking forward to, eh? You were gone all week - I only saw, like, 1 spam! I'm very dissapointed! (haha)
Maybe the spammers were on vacation too! :)