{"pk":28336,"title":"Taking Whorf to School: Does Language Reform Improve Student Learning?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"East Asian students routinely outperform American peers in mathematics. One source of this learning gap may be linguis-tic, such as explicitly naming part-whole relations in fractions (e.g., of four parts, one in Korean vs. one-fourth in English).Our study examined whether adopting such language would improve American children’s number-line estimates. To testthis, 83 10-year-olds were read fractions using either Korean-style or English names over pretest, training, and posttest. Inboth conditions, number-line problems either had no landmarks, landmarks that matched the denominator, or landmarksthat did not match the denominator. As expected, we observed a session by problem type interaction (F=2.71, p¡.05),indicating that feedback improved accuracy most for problems involving matching landmarks. Surprisingly, the effect ofKorean naming was to reduce accuracy across all problems and test phases (ps ¡ .01). Results offer an important warningagainst linguistic reform that may be harmful for American students.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Abstracts-Posters","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7t52w34x","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"John","middle_name":"","last_name":"Opfer","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Ohio State University","department":""},{"first_name":"Dan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kim","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Ohio State University","department":""},{"first_name":"Pooja","middle_name":"","last_name":"Sidney","name_suffix":"","institution":"Kent State University","department":""},{"first_name":"Charles","middle_name":"","last_name":"Fitzsimmons","name_suffix":"","institution":"Kent State University","department":""},{"first_name":"Clarissa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Thompson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Kent State University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28336/galley/18041/download/"}]}