momx2 -
I was told this by a teacher at the same school who has her master's degree in gifted education. Then later that same day I received a packet of info from Carnegie Mellon's C-mites program (DD9 is participates in C-mites). It is full of information for the gifted student -"Gifted Students in the Regular Classroom", "What Research Says About Ability Grouping", "Academic Acceleration" (last 2 by Dr. MAry Ann Swiatek, "The DT-PI Model", "Enrichment in Mathematics"(From Gifted Child Today march/April 1990, written by the director of the C-Mites program and Susan Assouline (author of the IAS), and a few more pages of resources.
In the article entitled "Issues" number 6 is "Students can be extremely talented in mathematics, but still make mistakes in computation". It goes on to say " Studies have demonstrated that mathematically talented youth perform significantly better on conceptual tests than on computational tests. These students seem to show a good intuitive grasp of mathematics, but they lack the same level of skill in computations. They might make mistakes in computations because they have developed bad habits such as not writing down their thought processes while problems solving. Perhaps their computational skills have not caught up to their advanced conceptual understanding of mathematics, because they have not learned the appropriate terminology or algorithms. These students should be challenged by learning new concepts while polishing their computational skills. They should not be held back because of a relative weakness in computations."
