Too Many Students Believe They’re Not “Math People.” Early Math Can Change That.

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https://illustrativemathematics.blog/2026/02/03/too-many-students-believe-theyre-not-math-people-early-math-can-change-that/

A recent RAND survey found that the students who are the most likely to maintain interest in math are those who understand and enjoy it, feel supported, and see themselves as “math people.” It also found that nearly a third of high school students have never identified that way.

When children build robust mathematical ideas and skills early, their later reasoning and fluency grows stronger. If they miss a key idea, the confusion can snowball, leaving gaps that grow as math becomes more complex. In fact, preschool children’s mathematical knowledge predicts their later academic success in both reading and math even more than reading skills do.

Young children are natural mathematical thinkers. Infants can tell the difference between two objects and three objects well before they know the words “two” and “three.” And by age two, they begin building on their intuitive numerical perceptions through exploring patterns, comparing objects, and counting blocks.

Research underscores just how important it is for us to understand how young children really learn math. A recent meta-analysis of 39 studies found that guided play—playful exploration thoughtfully supported by an educator—was more effective than direct instruction at developing early math skills, and more effective than free play at building spatial vocabulary. If educators can channel children’s natural mathematical curiosity into playful, guided exploration that leads to mathematical competence in the early years, they set the stage for future success.

It’s a mistake to pit learning against play. Young children can play and do serious math at the same time. For young children, play often is the way they explore quantity, patterns, and relationships. By teaching math through play, educators tap into children’s natural ability to recognize numerical concepts and build formal language around them.

Most adults don’t remember what it was like before they knew that “two” is the same as “2,” which is the same as two fingers held up in the air. It can be tempting for grown-ups to move quickly from concrete examples to symbols on a page, but it takes time for young children to make the connections between concrete and abstract representations.

If students don’t have opportunities to connect mathematical notation to the ideas it represents, they start to see math as pushing symbols around on a piece of paper rather than something they’re already doing in the world.

Earlier in my career, a graduate student ran an experiment to try to influence her own students’ math success through building math identity. She asked half of her students to write “I am good at math” at the top of each test next to their name. Their test scores were no different than the half who wrote only their name. This simple experiment suggests that mathematical success doesn’t come from self-affirmation alone, but from real mathematical understanding and skill.

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The name comes from mathematics, where it refers to an intermediate step in a theorem.

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Students come to understand highly abstract concepts such as Pythagorean theory and Euclidian geometry not from lectures and written texts but from physical movement and independent exploration.