Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources EPGY - did your kids need additional instruction?

DD has been using EPGY for about 2 months now. She's currently at about a 3.2 grade level in math. While she's using the program, I usually spend that time getting stuff done around the house, but lately she's calling me in to help her. (Or rather, she's been screaming and crying when she gets things wrong and I have to come in and help her.)

I'm not sure if she's getting instruction on all of these concepts or what. I can replay the session, but it just shows what she answered... or is there a way to replay the lectures and show when they were initially given? Of course there is the likelihood that she's just not listening to the lecture part.

If your child uses EPGY, do you find it gives enough instruction on its own or do you need to give lessons yourself on new concepts as they come up?

Here's a word problem she got today:
Mary goes to the store for her mother. She buys six oranges that cost twelve cents each and five apples that cost eleven cents each. How much does she spend?

This problem seems so much more complicated than what she should be expected to do given what's been introduced so far. I replayed her sessions from the last few weeks and this is the first problem of this type, so I don't know why they couldn't have said the fruit cost 4 and 5 cents or something easier for her to multiply. They haven't introduced any methods for multiplying a number with 2 digits. DD knew it could be done with repeated addition but she was crying at the thought of doing all that adding.

So, I showed DD she didn't have to add 12 6 times, she could do for example 12x6 = 10x6 plus 2x6. She was able to do that easily.

Just wondering if this is going to be the new norm for EPGY and I'll have to start teaching alongside the program or what. (Which is fine I guess but it's definitely nice to have something she can do independently.)

My DD hated the EPGY lectures, and would just skip over them, then have no clue how to work the problems.

I suspect that 6x12 was expected to be known as a rote fact, rather than worked out.

We haven't done EPGY math, but fwiw the problem you mentioned is very typical of problems my kids had in 3rd grade math. As Alexsmoms suggested, I also suspect the EPGY folks expect that 11s and 12s are supposed to be included with rote math fact memorization - they were for us.

Although we haven't done the EPGY math, my kids have done online math. Whether or not they could/did do it independently depended both on how easily they grasped math concepts as well as how much they liked working independently - my ds had no problem with it, but my dds are more social - they didn't really enjoy listening to the computer or reading explanations... they had a lot more "fun" with it when I was somehow involved. I didn't necessarily have to be showing them the concepts or explaining and/or checking their work - sometimes really all they wanted was for me to be sitting at the same table doing my own independent work.

polarbear

W'sMama--I'm so glad to know we're not the only ones who have noticed this about EPGY!! But I am sorry you're having difficulty. We have done pre-algebra and are now in the middle of algebra but have noticed a handful of instances when a problem is given before the lecture that explains how to do it--sometimes even right before. Also when we have commented on this, the tutor basically blows our comments off (sometimes rather snippily), which I find very irritating because 1) it's not cheap and we've only asked for actual help maybe two or three times in the almost year we've been doing EPGY and 2) if they took the comments seriously and fixed the problem, other people might not have the same issue later and given the number of people who take it they would probably have a 'perfect' program by now. But hey, why try to continuously improve your product when there's so little competition for online learning programs? (kidding...) Also we have noticed sometimes that the directions are unclear, resulting in DD wasting a lot of time answering the 'wrong' problem (for example, sometimes they want the entire set of factors written out, and sometimes they provide some and only want the missing factors, but the directions are ambiguous, which means you get it 'wrong' even though you had the right idea--but this doesn't affect your grade unless it's on a test, fortunately). Again, polite comments to that effect have been blown off, so we stopped commenting.

But those are my 'big' gripes; generally I think it's a good program, and I very much like that it will give you more problems in a particular area if you are missing problems and let you move along more quickly if you are not (at least that's what it's supposed to do, and it does seem to be that way).

I had originally hoped that DD would be able to do EPGY completely independently, but that didn't work so well (mainly she was daydreaming or goofing off unless I was there, despite her insistence that she really wants to learn new stuff--the whole thing was really her idea in the first place, so go figure). So I do sit with her and then she does pretty well generally, and enjoys learning the new ideas even if she finds some of the process to be boring from time to time. And I get to re-learn all this stuff too, which helps sometimes when something isn't clear to her, which doesn't happen too often but when it does it's good to be able to discuss it. So despite the issues and the need for me to be there too, I do think it's good for her, so it's worth it.

Okay if they're expecting times tables up to 12 to be memorized it makes more sense that they're giving that word problem... but the program definitely hasn't introduced 12x6 or 11x5 yet. (Sounds from what Dbat said that that kind of thing is not unusual.) There were a couple of times tables (up to 4) to be filled out over the past few weeks, but that's it. DD has no problem filling out a times table because you just start with zero and keep adding the number, and there's nothing else in the problem to interpret like there was for this one. I'm not so keen on trying to make sure she has her times tables memorized at the age of not-yet-6 so looks like I'll be keeping an eye on her work from now on.

Are you actually talking about cases where the question can't be understood until you know the meaning of some technical term in the question? I'd agree, then, that that's a problem; but the way this is worded makes it sound as though you think it would be ideal for a child never to see a problem they haven't yet been shown the techniques to solve. If what's what you meant, I (with my mathematician hat on, as well as with my parent-of-9yo-who-does-online-math hat on) really couldn't disagree more strongly.

IMNSHO, it's absolutely essential to see problems, make a serious attempt to solve them, and find that you can't, before you get introduced to a new technique. (At least regularly, if not every time.) Otherwise (a) you learn that you should be able to solve all problems, and that if you can't it means you haven't paid attention - which is false and damaging in the rest of life (b) why would you be interested in the new technique, for which you've never yet seen a need?

DS9 has done ALEKS courses on and off since he was 5; they have no teaching material, just questions. (They do have clickable definitions for new terms, which are useful, and worked solutions for the problems, which are not so useful.) DS prefers to call me if he gets stuck, rather than read the worked solution, so I have a fairly good idea of how often this happens, and it's rarely. Usually, he can work out how to tackle a question provided he can find out what the words in the question mean, because it's only a small jump beyond something he already knows how to do. He's two-thirds of the way through his current course and I suppose I've needed to explain something to him perhaps four times so far.

The AoPS books start each chapter with a few definitions, and then immediately some problems which you're supposed to work on before you read on. Then they work through the problems in the book, and often point out e.g. where a solution gets stuck for want of a result the reader doesn't know yet, or where a solution technique can be generalised and is worth writing down as a rule.

Of course children and courses are going to differ, and of course online courses (like books) will have bugs, but this pushed my buttons! Sorry if I've gone off on a rant against an interpretation that wasn't what you meant anyway :-)

The issue I had with in the EPGY course my DD did was that it was not always clear (even to me) from the problem on the screen what was supposed to go in the empty box. It wasn't getting the answer that was the issue, but that they had a particular (but not yet taught) desired intermediate step, and the empty boxes were in the intermediate step.

Yes, I noticed that- in the 2nd grade level the only things DD had consistent trouble with were problems like this:

Mary and Sue have twelve dolls together. Mary has four more dolls than Sue. How many dolls does Sue have?

Except they weren't just asking for the answer that Sue has 4 dolls. There were a bunch of empty boxes and plus and equals signs. So what they wanted was actually for the student to set up two equations using M and S as the variables.

m + s = 12
m = s + 4

I imagine that was probably in the lecture or examples, but I only came in when DD called and couldn't find a way to re-play it and ended up getting confused myself.

Aaaah, I see. So maybe someone designed the pegagogy, and someone else designed the input form, but the two things didn't marry up...

Have to say, boxes like those W'sMama describe would make me want to throw the computer across the room. So sympathy.

Yep, those were *exactly* the problems I was thinking of.

ColinsMum--respectfully, I certainly didn't mean to offend anyone, and I definitely agree with you--with the qualification that IMO it should be clear when the problem is something 'new' that may not be solvable with techniques already covered in the class. We haven't done AoPS but my impression is that learning how to solve new/different problems is kind of the point there, right? In the EPGY class, they present a lecture and then a series of problems that use the techniques just presented. Then sometimes there is a problem that can't be solved using techniques that were already presented--but it is not distinguished in any way from the problems that came before; it's just the next problem that comes up. In the context of the EPGY format, both my DD and I have found this to be confusing and frustrating. I am not a mathematician, so perhaps that is my problem, but at least from my perspective I think it helps give students confidence when the teacher makes it clear that the problem before them is one that they may not be able to solve, versus one that they should be able to solve had they been paying attention. To do otherwise feels to me (and independently to DD--she expressed this on her own) to be for lack of a better word unkind and not in a spirit of supporting the student. (DD--"why did they do that?") In the context of AoPS or a math puzzle contest, I totally agree with you, and have been trying to encourage DD to be more interested in learning how to solve problems. But IMO that is not how EPGY presents itself, and if that's what they're trying to accomplish I think it is counterproductive to try to slip it in unannounced. Maybe that's why I ended up giving up on math in college--my freshman calculus course was given by a professor who had a very thick German accent (that I couldn't understand at the time; maybe now I would have no problem) and who seemed to just write formulas up on the board for the entire hour. Perhaps I was supposed to know which parts I already knew, and where to go to find what I didn't already know?? Anyway, it doesn't matter for me because that was my last math class, but DD is better at it and I want her to be able to go as far as she can--so it would be great if the courses she takes encourage her rather than making her wonder if she missed something. If you still disagree, then I guess I would conclude that we have very different learning styles.

That's certainly helpful, and I won't argue with the idea that it's sensible for most children most of the time. My reservation is that, of course, in real life problems (of any kind) don't come so labelled - one of the things one has to learn is to tackle something even though to begin with you just don't know whether you can do it or not.

Well, yes and no. Yes, because the clue is in the name :-) No, because this is not an add-on, something intended to be presented alongside a "normal" class that does things differently: the idea is that you do AoPS geometry instead of any other geometry class. They do it this way because they think this is the way it should be done (at least for "high performing" students, and I don't think they are trying to be very exclusive here; this ought to apply to anyone who needs to be accelerated in maths, for example). See here and related pages.

More likely, different ideas of what it means to learn mathematics. I submit that there is practically no point in being able to solve problems only if you know in advance that you can solve them and have been taught a technique to do so. That's not doing mathematics; that's pretending to be a computer, and we have computers for that these days.

I have to agree with ColinsMum-- but that is an outlook which, pedagogically speaking, is most common in math and physical science, and quite rare elsewhere.

I have hypothesized that this is because those disciplines must, almost by definition, rely so thoroughly on a growth-mindset or a "problem-solving" one. It's about examining the problem and considering which tools one has available, and ultimately, considering and rejecting different approaches to that problem.

Other things are about turning the crank, in the euphemism frequently used by physicists and chemists re: learning a new tool. It's useful educationally, but generally ONLY unto basic proficiency. More useful is the examination of a problem which one LACKS the tools to solve adequately, elegantly, or easily.

Example: it is entirely possible and mostly adequate to approach Newtonian physics from an algebraic and iterative standpoint. 50 years ago, perhaps not so much as now, actually, given advances in computing power. But it will always lack the sheer accuracy and elegance of using calculus to do the job.

Really, calculus seems so much more... useful once you've considered what it takes to work problems without it.



Cultivating such an outlook early seems especially wise.

Personally, curricula which neglect this kind of pedagogy have all but killed my DD's avid learning of mathematics. It's one of the things that I've loved about Singapore's basic approach over Saxon and other curricula like it. Growth mindset. Not fixed.