When Flash Cards Are Not Enough
| Autor: | Linda J. Phillips |
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| Rok vydání: | 2003 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Teaching Children Mathematics. 9:358-363 |
| ISSN: | 2327-0780 1073-5836 |
| DOI: | 10.5951/tcm.9.6.0358 |
| Popis: | The Problem My work with Ashleigh began when a neighbor found out that I like to “do mathematics” with elementary students. She asked me to work with her third-grade daughter, Ashleigh, who had “a problem with subtraction,” she said. On timed tests of addition and even multiplication facts, Ashleigh was receiving grades of 90 to 100. On tests of subtraction facts, however, she was consistently coming home with scores in the 50s or lower. Ashleigh’s mom said they had studied with flash cards many times, but Ashleigh still could not remember her subtraction facts. “Also, she does this thing with her fingers when she does her subtraction homework,” Ashleigh’s mom said. “Her fingers get to flying, counting up and down and backward. . . . You’ll have to watch her to see what I mean.” When I did watch Ashleigh, I realized that she was trying to use a prescribed touching technique and also count backward with her fingers to do subtraction. These techniques became complicated when she needed to solve a problem such as 17 – 8. Her use of fingers caused accuracy errors, her dependence on touching the numerals to subtract was slowing down her performance rate, and her backward counting sometimes became muddled and ended in wrong answers. I noticed another side effect of her dependence on only these two techniques: She was not thinking about the numbers and their relationships. She was thinking only about counting backward or about where to touch the numerals. When she wrote her solution, she was unaware of whether it “made sense”; it simply was the answer she got when she was finished. Her lack of awareness of number relationships showed again when she was playing card games. Ashleigh knew that a 4 and a 6 make 10 and could get this answer when she added on paper. But when she tried to solve 10 – 6 or 10 – 4 |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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