During my investigation into why students dislike math I discovered that one of the main reasons for the hatred is that they feel incompetent. Understandable – no one likes to do something for which they lack the skills. The reasons underlying the incompetence are vast: one possible explanation is that much of math is not intuitive due to the lack of evolutionary need for it, and yet we have evolved in our acquired math capacity exponentially (pun intended). Another possibility involves the way math is taught. There seems to have been two opposing approaches to math education that put more effort into warring each other for the victory crown than attempting to understand what learning development and research says about the worth of their strategies. Turns out that the hands-on conceptual approach and the procedural approach that includes rote memorization are equally important and work together to effectively teach math skills. Imagine that?!? All facetiousness aside, I unearthed a further factor contributing to math competency. Since mathematics knowledge depends upon cumulative gains, it turns out that children who are exposed to “more numeracy-related activities at home show greater proficiency at [school].” In a study by LeFevre et al., parental “reports of numeracy activities were correlated with their child’s math performance.” The study looked at the correlations between activities like card games that directly involved skills such as counting and recognizing digits and activities such as baking that indirectly involve numeracy skills. The findings reinforced the hypothesis that the prevalence of direct and indirect numeracy activities at home is related to children’s “fluency with basic numerical skills, such as addition or number-line knowledge.” An interesting finding of the study is that a child’s “involvement in games predicted unique variability of the addition fluency measure,” that is, these children showed “substantial gains in their knowledge of number and magnitude.” While I don’t mean to pretend that certain math knowledge (such as LCM) is not important, the implications of this study with regards to what I witnessed in the elementary school classroom, are twofold. First, the students that I worked with must not have had the opportunity to engage in games and other numeracy activities at home for their unfamiliarity with numbers and basic math skills was obvious. (I blame it on television, but that's another blog.) Secondly, if games are a valuable tool for imparting math knowledge, teaching the class how to play cribbage and involving everyone in a round robin tournament may be a much more effective way to spend math class with a group of beginners than asking the same students to answer what is the lowest common multiple between two numbers on the chalk board. It is important to remember that as their teachers we must make the best choice for the direction of their learning. If they are two or more steps behind, it makes no sense to try to go forward. Playing a card game such as cribbage is a fun and sneaky way to slip math concepts into a child’s frame of reference! Something to think about anyway! References LeFevre, J., Skwarchuk, S., Smith-Chant, B. L., Fast, L., & Kamawar, D. (2009). Home numeracy experiences and children's math performance in the early school years. Canadian Journal Of Behavioural Science, 41(2), 55-66. doi:10.1037/a0014532
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AuthorNatalie Nickerson; that's me. Archives
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