Above is the research paper on Abacus. Click for more details.
HISTORY OF ABACUS
The word Abacus comes from a Greek word ‘abax’ or ‘abakon’ meaning ‘tabular form’, possibly derived from a Semitic word ‘abq’ or ‘sand’. It is the most primitive form of calculating device, invented somewhere between 300-500 BC. Abacus has traveled a long way and had transitions as it traveled through different countries. The Suanpan, one of the modern age Chinese abacus had 2/5 decks, but due to its complexity was replaced by Soroban abacus, a Japanese abacus, that was modified by a famous mathematician Seki Kowa. He removed one bead each from upper and lower decks to make it 1/4 decks, i.e., The abacus we use today, the Soroban abacus.
It gained popularity with the whole World competing on a common platform after Globalization. It had an impact on the education system of different nations.
Abacus enhances the overall comprehension of Math and Boosts better and faster calculation skills and improves problem-solving abilities. It would be easy to say abacus training become an essential element of learning Mental Math.
Seeing an expert abacus user in action is a sight to behold. Their hands are a blur as they perform arithmetic operations far quicker than anyone using an electronic calculator. The mental abacus technique is even more impressive – it works just the same as a real abacus, except that you visualise moving the beads in your mind’s eye.
There are many research on the benefits of teaching the mental abacus technique to children. Psychologists in the US have conducted a three-year randomized controlled trial of the effects of teaching the mental abacus on 183 five-to-seven year-old children at a charitable school in Vadodara, India. Their results suggest that training in the mental abacus can have impressive benefits for students mathematical abilities, above and beyond those seen for standard supplementary teaching.
The children took baseline tests of their maths and cognitive abilities, then they were allocated randomly to a group to receive three hours per week extra tuition in the abacus (the first year focused mostly on the physical abacus – specifically the Japanese soroban style – and then later years graduated to the mental abacus) or to a group that received three hours per week supplementary maths tuition, following the OUP New Enjoying Maths series.
When the children’s maths and cognitive abilities were tested again at the end of the three-year study, those in the mental abacus group showed superior improvements in their maths abilities, including calculation, arithmetic and the conceptual understanding of place value, compared with the control group (effect sizes were large), and some modest advantages in their academic grades in maths and science.
“We find evidence that mental abacus – a system rooted in a centuries-old technology for arithmetic and counting – is likely to afford some children a measurable advantage in arithmetic calculation compared to additional hours of standard math training,” the researchers said. “Our evidence suggests that mental abacus provides this benefit by building on children’s pre-existing cognitive capacities rather than by modifying their ability to visualise and manipulate objects in working memory.”