[ High School and Self-Education Board ]
Posted by Laurie4b on 11:20 Jun 17
In Reply to: (butting in, sorry) Martha raises an interesting point, Lori, about silly errors.... posted by Nicole
I was quite taken back when ds, who had always done well in math, suddenly started getting low scores on algebra tests due to the same kind of thing.
After about 4 months of floundering around not knowing what to do about it, a friend who teaches algebra teachers how to teach algebra reassured me that those kinds of errors were very common in the beginning. As the student progresses, they tend to stop making those errors. I have found that to be true. I do now require my son to write down every step (which he hated at first), and that helped. Also, requiring that at the beginning of a problem that he go and change any minus signs to plus a negative sign was also helpful. The sign gets attached to the number better that way. The third thing is to require checking his work with a reverse or alternate procedure, or plugging in the values he got and making sure they work for the equation,etc.
I think I made the mistake of worrying too much about these kinds of errors at the beginning, and slowed us down too much.