Replication data for: Children’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic math

This package contains the dataset and code used in the paper "Children’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic math." The package contains data from three studies investigating whether intuitive and school-taught skills build on each other. It contains data on children recruited from both schools and markets in both Kolkata and Delhi, collected between 2015 and 2024. The replication code, written in Stata and R, reproduces the tables and figures from the paper.

The abstract of the study is as follows:
Many poor children worldwide fail to master school mathematics, and yet some use mental arithmetic extensively outside of school. To investigate whether mathematics skills acquired in real-world settings transfer to the classroom and vice versa, we studied children working in markets in Kolkata and Delhi, India (n = 1,436). Nearly all the children used complex arithmetic effectively at work. They were also proficient in solving hypothetical market problems and verbal math problems that were anchored to concrete contexts. However, they failed to solve arithmetic problems of equal or lesser complexity when presented in the abstract format typically used in school. Children’s performance in market math is not explained by memorization, access to help, lower stress with more familiar formats, or high incentives for correct performance in markets. In contrast, children with no market-selling experience (n = 471), enrolled in nearby schools, showed the opposite pattern: They performed more accurately on simple abstract problems but only 1% could correctly answer an applied market problem that over a third of working children solved (b = 0.35; s.e. = 0.03; 95% CI = (0.30, 0.40); p < 0.001). School children used highly inefficient written calculations and could not combine different operations, arriving at answers too slowly to be useful in real-life or higher mathematics. These findings highlight the importance of educational curricula that bridge the gap between intuitive and formal mathematics.