I’ve spent the last 5 days in Ottawa, Ontario attending the second annual meeting of the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Sciences (MCLS) conference. I presented my preregistered research in Monday’s lunch poster session, entitled “Development of Decomposed Parallel Processing in Dual Language Immersion Second Graders”, available for download here.

My recruitment for the research has been slow-going, so the sample size is not nearly where it needs to be, but I have some promising effect sizes. If you have any feedback or questions about my research, I would love to hear it! Please contact me on twitter @noj_bel, leave a comment here, or email me at emmett.speed@gmail.com!

In addition to presenting my own research, I attended as many symposia as I could. There were 3 excellent symposium options for each section, and I had to choose which one to attend; it was impossible to choose! However, in every option, I would find myself sitting next to someone who’s work I had read, or who’s lab I had researched for future postdoc options, or who I followed on twitter (and sometimes all three).

Absolutely thrilled to sit in a symposium and hear people asking questions I was struggling to verbalize. I’m so used to be the only one in the room thinking numerical cognition thoughts. #MCLS2019— Emmett A. Speed (@noj_bel) June 16, 2019

Some of the symposia seemed to have been particularly tailored for my tastes, such as the “Linguistic Influences on Early Numerical Development” symposium on Tuesday afternoon.

Going to the “linguistic influences on early numerical development” symposium was the best choice I’ve made so far in… my life. Sooo much interesting work- I had to run up to 2 of the presenters and stop them from leaving so I could pick their brains #MCLS2019— Emmett A. Speed (@noj_bel) June 18, 2019

I was practically bouncing up and down in my seat listening to Jacob Paul’s description of the development of culturally relevant numerical skills in an indigenous Australian population and the “parallel analysis” (not direct comparison) of a sample in Melbourne, and to Victoria Simms’ research on the Irish immersion classrooms in Northern Ireland.

Between the horizontal structure of the conference, the highly international attendees, the shared meals, the variety of fascinating numerical cognition content, and the friendly, open, collaborative environment, this has been the best conference experience I could have ever hoped for. I’m looking forward to attending #MCLS2020 in Dublin next year!