Want Your Kids to Get Better at Math? Punish Them

My second grader is currently learning things like counting money, and greater, less than, or equal to. It doesn't always come the easiest so my wife and I are trying to figure out ways to help my kid understand math easier.

A new study shows that we might need to start punishing her when she gets an answer wrong.

Of course, you have to stop and realize that this study comes from France and it's about bees. Yes, BEES.

So here's the deal, Bees can do basic math apparently. Researchers found that if they punished the bees for wrong answers, the bees started to perform better.

A group of honeybees were split into two groups and taught to enter a Y-shaped maze. They had to choose between two options. The correct option having 4 shapes, while the incorrect option had anywhere from 1 to 10 shapes.

If one group got it right, they were rewarded with sucrose, and no punishment. The other group was punished with a dose of quinine if they got the answer wrong. Researchers noticed the group that was punished started to choose correctly ore often.

So should you start punishing your kid for incorrect answers? No. This study is on bees. Don't make that leap.