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Joined: May 2007
Posts: 982
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"Teachers often misinterpret the student's difficulties with the instructional strategies as inability to learn the concepts and assume that the student needs more drill to grasp the material. Rote memorization and drill are actually damaging for visual-spatial learners, since they emphasize the students' weaknesses instead of their strengths. When this happens, the student gets caught up in a spiraling web of failure, assumes he is stupid, loses all motivation, and hates school. Teachers then assume that the student doesn't care or is being lazy, and behavior problems come to the fore. Meanwhile, the whole cycle creates a very deep chasm in the student's self-esteem. Before my son started kindergarten he was doing two-digit subtraction using negative numbers, a method he came up with and preferred because it was easier for him to do mentally. Since he has dysgraphia I understood why he wanted to do as much mentally as possible. For something like 25-7 he would have said 5-7 is a negative two and negative two and twenty is 18. My husband and I told the two kindergarten teachers at the school about his different way of doing math and I got the feeling it was a problem. They seemed to think their job was to make sure my son did things the way they were taught at their school and only that way was allowed. I am glad my husband was with me because he saw for himself that this school was not going to work for our son but we let him try kindergarten anyway since it was just half day. This was before the teacher suggested holding him back in a transitional first grade so he could learn to color in the lines better and that it was okay because he didn't really need to learn anything else the next year. My son can't stand to watch math videos. He says they are too slow. He wants to quickly read how something is done, see a few good examples, do it and get it over with so he can read something or do something more interesting to him. For example,he had to learn scientific notation which is on IXL. IXL is for practice only and he had to learn it first. I tried to get him to watch math videos and he just couldn't do it because they were so slow. I ended up getting an old college introductory algebra book from my hoarder closet and he quickly read about it, looked at the examples and went to work. He could do the problems on IXL faster than I could. Another thing he can't stand is doing a lot of the same kind of problem which is why we like IXL because he can work on one thing and switch to something else when he gets tired of it. He usually gets tired after 5 or 6 of the same kind of problem and he has to switch because he sometimes starts making mistakes after that. Switching to something else usually solves this problem.
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Joined: Apr 2011
Posts: 1,694
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My DD loves the "live" section of mathletics, I am not sure what that involves at higher grades as she is in yr4. But for her I do think it is really helpful to be doing simple maths as fast as she can on a regular basis and she loves it so much that she is motivated to do all the other practice activities too.
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Joined: Jun 2008
Posts: 1,897
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My son really detests repetition, and I suppose this is part of his dislike of rote memorization. Time pressure is a big drag for him, he does not do well at all when time is emphasized, like freezing up 'under the gun'. When working challenging problems where the computation is only a small part of the bigger process, he doesn't stress out about the computation, so does much better all around. Master of none's description sounds very familiar!
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Joined: Apr 2009
Posts: 283
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Joined: Apr 2009
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Hi herenow,
I'm willing to bet that your child is rather bright and has been able to compensate/adapt until now. Like most of us, we know what 6-2 or 2+7 is, under normal conditions but under stress or tiredness or other things, it just gets slower and we easily make more mistakes.
Here are some ideas of what seems to be working for us:
- Write out everything, don't do it in your head. Especially when tired or stressed like on a test. Recognize your own body's feelings.
- Is she allowed a 'working' paper in math test? Or use the back of the 2nd page, for example... or just off the edge of the margin as a working area.
- When doing 6-2 does she prefer horizontal format or vertical? Write out things in the way she likes to see it.
- When writing out 6 - -2 go ahead and write it out and the mark it as a plus visually to show that two negatives make a plus
Maybe play some stressful timed games to get use to the feeling of being under pressure that is unrelated to math. Then do some math drill games for fun and just try to get better and better at it. Give self a reward when reach a reachable goal. The goal could be to get 2/10 right under 15 seconds and not break down from the stress and the reward will be ... . It is mastering the internal feeling. This is an ongoing technique that even adults find extremely useful in overcoming difficult problems.
best wishes
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Joined: Feb 2011
Posts: 433
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The first testing we did on DD1 as an OT assessment, and they found her to be very poorly integrated in terms of her senses, all top and bottom, that she still has some primitive reflexes and her visual processing speed is about 5 times faster than her auditory processing speed. Making her visual speed well above average and her auditory speed below what is considered acceptable to function well in a class room. He suggested that her sensory profile was enough of a mess on it's own to be causing her problems, but if her IQ was more than one standard deviation above her average sensory profile that was only going to enhance her problems - and it's more like 2+ deviations.
Next she saw an Ed Psych, who noted that she first thought that DD was a classic case of Inattentive ADD - until she introduced tests with a visual component and realized DD had no trouble focusing on visual tests. Like the OT she also suggested a strong auditory deficit with likely auditory processing disorder, which is apparently often linked with poor working memory. I don't think it was directly to do with her WISC results (other than the appalling working memory) so much observations during testing that lead the Psych to suggest auditory processing issues.
The pscyh recommended a review by an audiologist, which we are finally doing now 2 years later. We didn't do it at the time for various reasons, amongst which was that it wasn't urgent then because she was already getting amazing support at school and a formal diagnosis wasn't going to add anything. But as she gets older a formal diagnosis will give her more time on exams etc.
At the time we felt like the OT and Ed Psych we saw 2 yrs ago painted a really clear picture of DD1 and she has made great progress since. However, since DD2's testing a few weeks ago and my doing more research and learning about 2E kids I do question why the psych we saw did not comment with such extreme scatter (40+ points) that DD was likely gifted and compensating and that both her top and bottom scores might be inaccurate. I also wish she had talked to us about the visual-spatial idea that was only put to us a few weeks ago when we called a new psych about re-testing both girls on the SB-V. I don't think that the visual-spatial learning is the only issue with DD, but it really does explain a lot too. wow. I can't tell you how much I have learned from this one post. I looked up auditory processing speed and am mulling it over, but not sure it fits my dd's profile overall. It's just a little tricky, because these children are pretty good at compensating for their weaknesses...until they can't anymore. I am going to watch her a little more closely, and ask a few more questions. Would an auditory processing deficit have a big impact on something like learning a new language? or is the visual so mixed in it's hard to say?
Last edited by herenow; 04/27/11 07:29 AM.
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Joined: Feb 2011
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- When doing 6-2 does she prefer horizontal format or vertical? Write out things in the way she likes to see it...
Maybe play some stressful timed games to get use to the feeling of being under pressure that is unrelated to math. Then do some math drill games for fun and just try to get better and better at it. Give self a reward when reach a reachable goal. The goal could be to get 2/10 right under 15 seconds and not break down from the stress and the reward will be ... . It is mastering the internal feeling. This is an ongoing technique that even adults find extremely useful in overcoming difficult problems.
best wishes You called that one. DId you read this article? http://www.science20.com/news_releases/math_under_stress_working_memory_keya small excerpt: The type of working memory involved in solving math problems may be affected by the way the problems are presented. When arithmetic problems are written horizontally, more working memory resources related to language are used (solvers usually maintain problem steps by repeating them in their head). However, when problems are written vertically, visuo-spatial (or where things are located) resources of working memory are used. Individuals who solve vertical problems tend to solve them in a way similar to how they solve problems on paper. Beilock wanted to know if stereotype-induced stress (i.e. reminding women of the stereotype that "girls can't do math") would result in different results for solving vertical versus horizontal math problems. The findings showed that the women who had been exposed to the negative stereotype performed poorly, although only on the horizontal problems (which rely on verbal working memory). Beilock suggests that the stereotype creates an inner monologue of worries, which relies heavily on verbal working memory. Thus, there is insufficient verbal working memory available to solve the horizontal math problems. I think I am going to get the Krypto game to start, but have her work on paper, vertically  She needs some "success" before going on to some of the harder things. I like the mathinasium idea (especially as it takes me out of the equation). I tried to look at mathletics, but couldn't figure out how to do it --it looked like it was just for schools. I agree we will have to find a way for her to practice under stress... maybe later. Thanks everyone!
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Joined: Feb 2011
Posts: 433
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That's interesting, herenow.
Wanted to just say that, at my house, we try to play Krypto without time and point pressure. So it becomes more "let's see if I can figure out something for these cards" than trying to win. You may want to start out that way too. absolutely. She absolutely needs to start with "success with no stress" and work her way up to dealing with it under time stress. I think Kumon does this -- they start the child off really really easy, and help them develop confidence. Thank you for the game idea. It looks like just the thing to work on math skills, math sense, and holding numbers in your head. It looked like I can start with the "easier" numbers first?
Last edited by herenow; 04/27/11 01:26 PM.
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Joined: Apr 2011
Posts: 1,694
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Herenow - thanks for that article, absolutely fascinating, given my DD's working memory was over 4 standard deviations from her VCI!
With Mathletics here in Australia it is mostly used by schools but anyone can sign up. You do have to pay, about $90 p/a I think it was, but here at least there is a 1 or 2 weeks money back period which gave me the confidence to go ahead and see if it worked for DD. Given how obsessed with it she is, and she seems to have taught herself (or asked us to teach her) 1/2 of this years curriculum in the last 3 weeks, I figure it was $90 well spent. From what I can make out from discussions on local forums you also have much more control over how your child uses it including the ability to switch grade levels, if you pay yourself rather than the school controlling it.
Unfortunately the Mathletics website is detecting my location and forcing me to the Australian version of the site so I can't see what mathletics.com looks like and how similar it is to our version.
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