Young children understand math

In one experiment, the children saw 13 blue dots on a computer screen; those were covered, and then they saw 17 blue dots and were forced to keep the running tally in their heads. Then they were shown 50 red dots and asked whether there were more blue dots or red dots.

Presented this way, the children answered correctly about two-thirds of the time that there were more red dots than blue dots.

This is significant, since if they were just guessing they would get it right only half of the time.

This is a part of my How To Teach Your Child to Count and Use Numbers book.