Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion No Longer Doing Well in Math

We are also seeing this for the first time with our 9-year-old, accelerated to 6th grade math. Huge grade drop got our attention. Seems to be a few things: setting up problems in a clear, consistent manner (the clear part is harder when your handwriting isn't too neat and the spaces are small), checking over the work, rechecking. He's made a lot of progress with those things.

For the original poster, I would think perhaps this is an important time to coach her through approaching a challenge and figuring out things to try to overcome it. Based partially on personal experience and partially on our son's experience of finally hitting a struggle. It's easy for girls and particularly, gifted girls, to hit that first set of bad grades and to decide they are no longer good at the subject.

Does your DC make the same mistakes consistently? For our DD, highly gifted in math, when she could see where she tended to make mistakes on the math it made all the difference. She would work all the way through some moderately hard problem, get to the end and get some basic math fact wrong. Think working a Trig problem, getting to the end and subtracting 3 from 32 and getting 30. Once DD knew she tended to do this, she corrected for it and slowed down on the simpler math at the end. Still made some of the errors, but was much more likely to catch them herself when checking over her answers because she knew that it might be wrong. This was crucial for her when she was taking the SAT because she was 3 years beyond that math and it was really easy to "rush" on the problems.

Also found that talking about test taking strategies like what to study (and how), what will most likely be on the test, how to check problems (many kiddos do not know how to work the problems in reverse because the teacher may not have covered it), as well as assessing what this teacher wants on the test and homework was helpful.

Since your DC's grades were impacted last year, could you give an end of year exam for last year's class and see if she has any weak areas? Shoring those up with a tutor (or knowledgeable parent) may improve things for her now.

Thanks for all the input. It's given me some good questions to ask her and to ask my DH, who's the one who has looked at her homework. He confirms that she always sets the problems up correctly and can talk about her reasoning, and it's almost always sound. He says she just makes calculation errors in the middle of problems and then works the remainder of the problems with faulty numbers. This seems in line with what her teacher says and with what DD says about getting distracted. So I think that she really needs to work on focusing and checking her work. We talked about it and she says she thinks this might help.

She did have a very dry teacher last year who was super-particular about non-math things like where to place problems on the page and other things that were really just jumping through hoops.

As far as assessing whether she learned the concepts last year in Algebra 2, she took a standardized assessment that included Algebra 2 and even some calculus and she got a 99%Ile score.

She has a test tomorrow and we've talked about taking her time and checking her work. I will talk with her about taking time to work the problems backwards. Hopefully since we've talked about how she thinks she loses focus she will be more aware of that as well. I will also ask her what she thinks about working the easiest problems first.

Thanks for all the ideas. Hopefully she'll see some improvements.

Well, anxiety is the obvious first issue since test scores are the biggest factor in her grade decline. After that, I think working memory, processing speed, and executive functioning (in this specific context) could be contributing factors. It has been my observation that most kids of average or above intelligence are actually ready at a conceptual level for more accelerated math than their school provides to them; however, most kids do not have the working memory, processing speed, or executive function to handle the accelerated curriculum as designed. Schools hold half the kids back because it is much easier to teach them when they are not just conceptually ready but have all the supporting tools to succeed without accommodations.

DS12 is one year behind your DD math-wise and hasn't hit his wall yet in school math; however, I have seen this phenomenon in competition level math with a time element like the AMC 8 and AMC 10 over the years. He simply made far fewer "careless" errors after he mastered/internalized concepts versus when he just understands these concepts - this conforms with what I have heard from some top math competitors.