I wondered, after reading the articles, whether much of the improvement is because the *teachers* understand the math better when using a curriculum that breaks procedures into micro-steps. Too often my kids have had teachers who didn't seem to have very deep understanding of math, sometimes that means they gloss over why & how something or other works, sometimes that means that they reject an alternative way of getting an answer, or don't understand a symbol or terminology, there are all sorts of ways this has played out. It's hurt both kids, though worse for the child who is less confident in math skills (note: that child is still advanced 2 grade levels in math). There have been published reports on the poor math knowledge and skill of elementary school teachers in particular, anything that rectifies that situation has got to be an improvement.
Kcab
I totally agree. My DH and I have had this conversation a lot about teaching methods and he recognized as a tutor as an engineering student he knew only 1 way to do something, he could teach his way of doing things but if the kid didn't get his way DH was sort of stumped about how to explain what he intuitively understood. I was on the other side learning programing, I was constantly asking the "but why" questions and couldn't really understand how to do it until someone could, although oddly I was a fantastic debugger. Have the king of "but why" for a DS has been great for forcing DH to confront this aspect LOL
For DS 5 who does not seem intuitively mathy, we have just noticed something based in an article I think I read here or maybe in response to the jump math on NYT, DS has trouble with 11-19, he knows them in order to recite but often gets them wrong as part of something adding or subtracting or even reading the number sometimes. My gut was about dyslexia since I have reversal issues with letters and numbers, but with DS it really seems to be that he doesn't intuitively get that twelve is 10 +2 so we have started to refer to it that way.
I really liked the second article and the problem with the bags and then x, we do that with DS5, so right now he gets having x in an equation but screws up 13 and 31 all the time!
DeHe
