Studies Find That Use of Learning Toys Can Backfire
Though some children helped, others distracted by in-class ‘manipulatives.’
Learning toys have become big business in the United States. At home and in their classrooms, children use plastic letters to master the alphabet, interlocking blocks to learn arithmetic and the base-10 system, and pretend money to work out word problems.
A growing number of studies, though, suggest that such learning toys, or “manipulatives” in eduspeak, don’t guarantee learning success.
While many studies show that using concrete objects can boost children’s understanding of abstract concepts, others suggest they make no difference at all, and sometimes...
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