My Town Tutors

Tag: mathematics

  • Six Rules for Flashcard Learning Success

    My Town Tutors is a great resource for parents & teachers. Find qualified tutors in your area today!




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    Author Bio: Don Crawford, Ph.D. is a long time educator who has been a teacher, a college professor of education, and an administrator.  His company, R&D Instructional Solutions, in Portland, Oregon, publishes Rocket Math and other math-related instructional materials.

    Students who need tutoring often have had more than their fair share of failure experiences in school.  They need to experience a lot of success to continue to be motivated to learn.  Flashcards, done the right way, can be very motivational.  Students can learn all kinds of facts using flashcards, and become quite proud of the information they have learned.

    Done the wrong way, flashcards can be frustrating and detrimental to a student’s self-image.

    Rule #1: Have a working deck of no more than 12 or 15 flashcards. Anything more and the cards don’t repeat often enough for their answer to still be remembered.  It is only by answering the question correctly that the neural connections to the right answer become strengthened.

    Rule #2: No more than 3 or 4 of those cards should be new information. In other words, most of the cards in the working deck should be known items.  This can be a challenge for a tutor to create flashcards for things the student already knows but it is essential.  It doesn’t matter what those cards are—they could be identifying common objects or numbers—but they should already be known.  That way the student can concentrate on learning a few (3 o4) new things in a sea of already known stuff.

    Rule #3: Each session should be no longer than three to five minutes. Working on flashcards is demanding mental work, so limited the sessions. After a break of about 30 minutes you can have another session.  If you have shorter sessions, you can start again sooner, but the breaks should be at least 15 minutes in length.  Too long and it becomes punishing for the student and performance will deteriorate.

    Rule #4: Use "cold" run-through to determine master of a deck. Mastery of the working deck is assured only when the first time the cards are done in the day, known as a “cold” run-through, there are no hesitations or errors.  When the working deck is mastered, the tutor can add three new cards to the working deck, and at the same time, must remove three of the oldest (practiced longest) cards from the deck.  That way, rule number one is followed.

    Rule #5: Correction and repetition is key! The fifth rule is how to correct.  Any time there is a hesitation or an error, the tutor says the question and the correct answer, asks the student to repeat the target card’s question and answer, and then puts the target card back only three cards from the front.  This is important so that the target card comes up before the student forgets the answer.  Remember: it is only by answering the question correctly that the neural connections to the right answer become strengthened.

    Rule #6: Create a review deck. The sixth rule is to take the cards that were mastered and removed from the working deck to make a review deck.  These cards should be reviewed every few days, to be sure they remain in memory, using the same practice procedures as with the working deck.

    If you follow these six rules, you will be amazed at how successful your student is doing flashcards.  That success will be motivating to your students.  The information learned will be a feather in his/her cap as well.

  • Connect, Engage and Succeed in Math: HOTmaths & Tutoring

    Connect, Engage and Succeed in Math – Why tutoring with HOTmaths can improve your chances of success.
    For any parent or student considering or already engaging a tutor for math there are 4 keys to success to consider.  HOTmaths (www.hotmaths.com.au) has been designed and built by math teachers to meet the needs of students who learn different things at different times at a different pace and for different reasons.  Math is universal, whereas HOTmaths was born Australian – the birthplace of many inventions that we cannot do without today, such as the notepad (yes, the paper one!), the electric drill, plastic spectacle lenses and WiFi .  Here are the 4 keys to success and how HOTmaths can help:
    1. Build the foundations before the walls

    Everything you learn in math is built on what comes before.  Any concept that is being taught at any level beyond learning to count requires prior knowledge, understanding and application of prior concepts.  This is why any teacher, tutor or student subscribing to HOTmaths has access to all topics, all lessons and all year levels of the site.  In every lesson there are links to previous concepts that are needed in order to ensure the best learning outcomes, so students jump immediately to something they need to review or re-study.  These links can also be discovered through the HOTmaths dictionary. Student topic and lesson reports show the teacher/tutor where individual students have struggled and allow them to direct remedial work where necessary through the Task Manager application that enables the teacher/tutor to set specific class or homework tasks that target specific student needs.

     

    Fig 1 – links to prior content

    Fig 2 – Dictionary showing explanation and links to prior content

    Fig 3 – Setting homework tasks

    2. Engage, don’t lecture

    Technology in education has radically changed how we teach and learn – the new learning environment is flexible, expansive, interconnected and individualized.  HOTmaths takes advantage of these new possibilities by providing students with multiple entry points into math content, then allowing them to choose to learn in the way that suits them best. Learning is personalized, varied and vitally, fun.

    There are ‘widgets’ (interactive activities and games) that engage visual learners who may struggle with text-based or traditional teacher-led lessons.  For kinesthetic learners, those that learn by doing, there is a range of open-ended investigations and problem-solving tasks linking math to the real world and turning theory into tangible, comprehensible ideas. Students who prefer to work logically and methodically, often text-based learners, are supported with walkthrough problems that guide students step by step through the skills needed to complete multi-step tasks.  These activities break questions down into single, logical steps that the student can work through at their own pace and level, receiving individualized feedback as they go to reinforce their understanding of the processes.

    Regardless of the way students learn or choose to study, their work is instantly marked and their level of understanding diagnosed.  In this reflexive and highly individualized learning environment, teachers/tutors can customize a learning path for each individual student to give them the best chance of successful learning.

    * *

     

    Fig 4 – Widgets and games engage students’ imagination

    Fig 5 – HOTsheet investigations encourage problem solving

    Fig 6 – Walkthoughs lead students on a step by step journey of discovery

    3. Teach, don’t test

    Regardless of how we might feel about standardized testing, we live in a results oriented world, and parents want their children to succeed. Teachers and tutors are expected to prepare students for examinations, testing what they have learned and practicing test-taking conditions and techniques. HOTmaths offers test-generating facilities that teachers/tutors can use to create practice tests and timed conditions. Tests can be customized with ease to focus on specific areas needing practice for whole classes, groups and even individuals.  This allows for valuable class time to be spent teaching, not testing.  Timed and time-limited tests can be assigned as homework with results immediately available to teachers/tutors in a format that is fully exportable for keeping parents up-to-date with their child’s progress.

    Fig 7 – Test generator for creating bespoke, self-marking tests

    4. Learn, don’t memorize

    Benjamin Franklin once said ‘Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.’  The reason most parents employ a tutor for their child is because a good tutor identifies the individual needs of the student and adapts to her capabilities.  As we have seen, HOTmaths provides the tools good teachers and tutors need to personalize lessons, engage student attention and create enthusiasm and interest that involves each student in math so that they learn, not just remember.

    Learning and remembering are not the same. Anything remembered can be forgotten. Anything learned is for life. Is it possible to ‘un-learn’ how to ride a bicycle for example?   Real learning comes when we take risks. We have to fall off a bicycle before we learn to ride.

    The opposite of ‘remember’ is ‘forget’.  There is no opposite for learning, nor is there a substitute.

    To try HOTmaths free click here.  For more information about trialing HOTmaths with a group of students with full access to reporting and assessment tools or for group pricing quotes, click here.
    Mark O’Neil is CEO of HOTmaths and passionate about education. He believes that imagination and creativity need to be given a higher priority in schooling and that only a transformation of how children are educated will lead to more children succeeding.  Follow him on twitter @moneil365 and @hotmathshq