Elizabeth Spelke Quotes


You see the same profile of difficulty among the educated Bostonian adults, and the going-to-school Bostonian kids, and the adults and children in the Amazon. The problems that were hard for them were hard for us. - Elizabeth Spelke



While geometrical concepts can be enriched by culture-specific devices like maps, or the terms of a natural language, underneath this variability lies a shared set of geometrical concepts. Those concepts allow adults and children with no formal education, and minimal spatial language, to categorize geometrical forms and to use geometrical relationship to represent the surrounding spatial layout. - Elizabeth Spelke



When children start learning math in school, they already have a basic understanding of the concepts. This understanding should guide teachers to work on enhancing these skills. - Elizabeth Spelke



What's central about numbers for us as adults is that we can apply a number like 7 to a diverse number of things. We can say that there are seven dots but also that a horn honks seven times. Although these are different in their sensory qualities, the numbers are the same. - Elizabeth Spelke