Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Even before formal schooling, children’s brains can grasp ratios as holistic magnitudes—suggesting they’re naturally wired to understand foundational fraction concepts like comparing amounts.
For many students, math is a tough subject that can have a lot of anxiety associated with it. Within math, fractions are often considered particularly hard.
Although important for the acquisition of later math skills, fractions are notoriously difficult.
In 2012, Edward Hubbard, a cognitive neuroscientist and assistant professor with UW‒Madison’s Department of Educational Psychology, created the Educational Neuroscience Lab to understand — through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) — how the physical changes that occur in children’s brains as they learn may help improve education practices.
Title: Neural Distance Effects When Comparing Fractions and Line Ratios Legend: Left: Adult participants were asked to compare pairs of fractions (top), combinations of fractions and line ratios (middle) or pairs of line-ratios (bottom), while we recorded accuracy and reaction time (RT). Pairs were chosen so that some were “near” (i.e., similar, like 5/7 vs. …
Waisman researcher Edward Hubbard likes to tell a story about burgers. In the early 1980s, A&W Restaurants introduced a new burger that had a third of a pound of beef. This burger was supposed to compete with MacDonald’s quarter-pound burger and because both burgers were priced the same, A&W executives expected their bigger burger to …
