-
Welcome to Teachers At Risk
-
Share/Save/Bookmark
Children's Mental Health Ontario
International Edubloggers Directory
The Learning Disabilities Association of Canada
Nov
18
Kindergarten math skills seem to be the best predictor of future achievement
Filed Under "At-risk" students
Kindergarten math skills seem to be the best predictor of future academic achievement according to a recent study of School Readiness and Future Achievement in the November 2007 issue of The Journal of Developmental Psychology. I found that amazing. I’d always believed that reading skills were the best predictor of academic achievement. But, I guess I was mistaken.
Just recently, I’d been part of a committee at my school that analyzed the results of the provincial math scores for our school to determine where the grade nine math students who wrote the test last year had the most difficulty, because of course we want the kids to do better. It seemed to me that many kids were being tripped up by word problems. They had little difficulty with the knowledge questions, but as soon as they were called upon to apply their knowledge in word problems, they were in trouble. I put that down to poor reading skills, but maybe something else is at work.
When I ask kids to solve word problems many of them have no idea how to go about doing this. I think that these kids would benefit from learning self-scaffolding strategies so they would automatically ask themselves the questions that would help them help themselves. English classes have the 5 W’s that students use to help themselves. You know- the where, when, what , why , who and how we tell kids to think of when they are completing reading or writing assignments. Math needs something like that for word problems. Yes, kids use BEDMAS to help them determine the order of operations, but they need something like that for word problems. One of the science teachers said that the mnemonic G R A S S could be used. I’m sure the kids would remember the word GRASS. However, it’s not that grass. It’s G for what are you given; R for what are you required to do; A for what application would do- that is would you +,-, x or /, S for solve it and S for use a statement answer. I’m going to try the GRASS strategy with my grade nine students. I’m sure it will create a buzz!
Getting back to that study about math and future success. Apparently math skills or I guess in the case of kindergarten, it would be pre-math skills, also predict reading achievement by grade three. Another surprise- what can I say. I knew reading skills affected math achievement, but I didn’t realize math skills affected reading achievement. Oh yes, according to the study the other important predictor for achievement is attention span. Well, that makes sense. That’s not surprising. You have to be able to focus in order to learn, and you need to be able to focus in order to be able to complete the task. Something else that was surprising though was that academic achievement isn’t affected by anxious, withdrawn or aggressive behaviour if kids have pre-math and pre-reading skills and are able to focus on what they’re doing. That’s good to know.
What can we take away from this study? Well, for me it suggests that not only would pre-school kids benefit from being read to on a regular bases, but they would also benefit from having numbers incorporated into their lives. Little did I know how beneficial it was to have my little ones count stairs as we climbed them, or count the the number of people who would be staying for dinner so that we could set the correct number of plates, forks, knives etc on the table. I found that the little kids that I was around loved counting things. I wonder why that is and I wonder why they lose the love of numbers.
Kindergarten math skills seem to be the best predictor of future achievement [5:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (363)Comments
4 Responses to “Kindergarten math skills seem to be the best predictor of future achievement”
Leave a Reply
Stumble It!
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. -
Great post…I responded here
.
Mathew,
Thanks so much for sharing your insights as a primary school teacher. It makes perfect sense to me when you say kids need to understand number concepts. I wonder why I thought counting was enough? I guess I was focusing on reading more than math literacy. Now that I teach kids who need extra support with math, I see first hand how important understanding concepts is. After all, they can use a calculator. Sometimes I get stuck on the fact they don’t remember their times tables or how to do long division. I should really be talking about the concepts. Thanks for making me see that.
Concept in maths teaching is very important. It is like applying the idea of Pareto Ratio of 80 / 20. Learning concept is covering the 20% to solve the later part of the learning which is the 80%. We have to strike to make maths interesting to the young learners and keep them going further.
Great post - I submitted it to stumbleupon.com - perhaps you’ll get some new readers. ;^D