Are East Asian versus American differences in arithmetical ability a recent phenomenon?

Abstract

China Central Institute for Educational Sciences Younger and older American and Chinese adults were administered arithmetic, perceptual speed, and spatial orientation tests. For the perceptual speed and spatial orientation tests, the younger adults showed substantial performance advantages over the older adults in both the United States and China. For the arithmetic tests, the younger Chinese adults outperformed the older Chinese adults, but the groups of younger and older American adults had comparable arithmetical abilities. Cross-national comparisons indicated that the younger Chinese adults outperformed the younger American adults on the arithmetic tests, but not on the perceptual speed and spatial orientation tests. The performance of the older American and older Chinese adults was comparable for all of the ability measures. The overall pattern suggests that the advantage of Chinese adults over American adults in complex arithmetic might be a relatively recent phenomenon. The first systematic cross-national study of mathematical abilities was conducted in 1964 (Hus~n, 1967). The results of this study showed that American adolescents were among the most poorly educated students in mathematics in the industri- alized world. In the ensuing 30 years, this basic finding has been replicated many times and has been shown to be true for nearly all mathematical domains, from arithmetic to complex mathe- matics (Crosswhite, Dossey, Swafford, McKnight, & Cooney, 1985; Lapointe, Mead, & Askew, 1992). Differences between the mathematical development of American children and chil- dren from other nations are often times most extreme when comparisons are made between the United States and East Asian nations (i.e., China, Korea, Taiwan, & Japan; e.g., Ste- venson, Chen, & Lee, 1993; Stevenson et al., 1990)J The con- sistency of academic achievement differences between children from the United States and children from East Asian nations has led some scientists to argue that these differences stem David C. Geary, Department of Psychology, University of Missouri-- Columbia; Timothy A. Salthouse, School of Psychology, Georgia Insti- tute of Technology; Guo-Peng Chen, Department of Psychology, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China; Liu Fan, Department of Psychology, China Central Institute for Educational Sciences, Beijing, China. The research was supported by Grant 1 R01-HD27931 from the Na- tional Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Grant AG06826 from the National Institute on Aging. We thank Melissa Moon and Ravindran Sabapathy for their assis- tance with data collection and collation, Zhitang Liu for his assistance with the translations, and Mark Ashcraft, Donald Kausler, and Robert Siegler for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David C. Geary, Department of Psychology, 210 McAlester Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211. 254 largely from a difference in the general intelligence of Asian and American individuals (e.g., Lynn, 1982; Rushton, 1992). In this study, we present evidence that the advantage of East Asian individuals over their American peers in arithmetical abilities probably did not exist 60 years ago, and that the more recent East Asian advantage in arithmetic, and perhaps other mathematical domains, likely reflects secular changes within the United States rather than an East Asian advantage in intel- ligence. The hypothesis that the advantage of East Asian indi- viduals over their American peers in arithmetic is a relatively recent phenomenon is based on two lines of research: cross- generational changes in the arithmetical development of Amer- ican children and differences in the arithmetical abilities of younger and older American adults. One dimension that distinguishes the arithmetical development of American children from their East Asian cohorts is the sophis- tication of the strategies used in problem solving (Fuson & Kwon, 1992a; Geary, Fan, & Bow-Thomas, 1992). For the solving of sim- pie arithmetic problems, such as 8 + 7, when an answer cannot be remembered, American children tend to count mentally or on their fingers (Geary et al., 1992; Siegler, 1987 ). Children from East Asian nations, in contrast, typically use a form of decomposition, in which the digits are decomposed into smaller sets which, in turn, are added together (Fuson & Kwon, 1992a; Geary et al., 1992). For instance, to solve 8 + 7, the child might decompose the 7 into a 2 and a 5, and then retrieve the answers to 8 + 2, and 10 + 5. The use of decomposition appears to be dependent on a basic understanding of sets, and, as such, should probably be considered a conceptually more sophisticated problem-solving approach than counting (Fuson & Kwon, 1992a). East Asian children not only The mathematical achievement of children from China, Korea, Tai- wan, and Japan is generally comparable ( Lapointe et al., 1992; Steven- son et al., 1993).