Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Arithmetic and processing speed.

On the WISC lV my DS(then 6) scored 144 - 99.8 percentile on the arithmetic part, but only 103 - 58th percentile on processing speed. I've been aware of issues with this difference for a while now, but am just facing a new hurdle. DS(now 7) has been grade skipped 2 grades in Math, and until now this has worked well. However Math Minutes are now the thing, and although he knows his tables inside out (he's always quickest in the class orally), he's really slow at getting the answers down in timed test (of course he is 2 years younger than others in the class). For instance he came home with a 72% score due to the unfinished questions today. In itself this isn't a big deal, but the school has really been on board advancing him, and have before now suggested they accelerate him further next year without me even having to ask: ). I'm afraid of loosing their confidence if this 'hic-up' becomes an issue, and really want to be ready to respond if that's the case. Any ideas? Also, do you think this discrepancy is going to cause problems with his Math in the long run? Has anyone had experience of this? It would be so disappointing because he truly loves the subject. He's done well in all other Math tests that haven't been timed so precisely.

If you haven't seen this before, it may help.

http://www.mathsolutions.com/documents/9781935099031_message18.pdf

Especially this part:

Thanks inky. The actual Math recall is very easy for DS, he's blindingly fast at all four of the basic computations. Somehow though, he takes a long time writing what he knows. He has no fine motor issues - excellent handwriting etc, but he is a perfectionist.

I wouldn't worry too much about the school losing confidence since he's so quick with the oral answers. My biggest concern would be making sure your son doesn't start feeling like he's "bad at math" because of the timed written tests. The perfectionism would be a good thing to work on in any case. Maybe you could give him some number dicatation at home to get more comfortable with fast, messier numbers when needed.

I'm with Inky - my DD7 can do the simple math facts fine, orally, or with a computer game, but put those 40 simple math problems in front of her on paper and have a "race" to finish in a minute and she freezes. It has gotten so bad that she now does feel that she is "bad at math" because she was getting the lowest scores in class. (And yes, the whole class knows because the kids correct each others and then call out points to let the teacher know if they passed or not!)
We finally got the teacher to accept the fact that she can do this stuff, but won't when there are really only 10 different problems being asked 4 times to be solved in aminute. So the teacher finally agreed to let her just do 20 in a minute before going on to the next letter of more simple, tedious problems.
With DD she also says that she just can't write her numbers messily enough to get them down quickly enough to pass all 40 in a minute. We've actually worked on her writing numbers messily to try and improve her score, but she couldn't stand writing them that way and that slowed her down even more!

Yes, the irony that he could consider himself bad at Math because of this, bothers me the most. He already feels 'his achievement has gone down' - his words not mine.

Hmmmm, I wonder... At that age, my DS had a hard time when there were a lot of problems on one page. The issue was visual. Once the problems were printed out so that they were larger and not so many on the page, it wasn't so intimidating and he did fine. Now, he doesn't object to pages full of problems, although he still doesn't like them.

What a great idea, I hadn't though of that before. We're on spring break this week and I know before the week is over I will be playing school with DD, so maybe I'll try larger print problems and see how she does with them. Currently her 40 questions are on 1/2 of a piece of paper, with the other half being a repeat of a similar set for the student to do as homework practice if they didn't make it through the set in class.

Another idea is to do what some schools do and have the student tested orally. The way it would work is that the teacher has one copy and the student another. The teacher directs the student to work either horizontally or vertically across the page, and just say the answer (not the problem and answer). The teacher writes down whatever the student says. This avoids having motor skills/concerns about neatness interfere with demonstration of fact fluency.