musings

To memorise or not to memorise - that is the question...

I have invested a lot of time into developing an understanding of how Mathematical Fluency develops. Maths can be such a polarising topic - you either love it or you hate it! Generally speaking, you sit in the "love it" camp if you experienced success in maths at school, and you fall into the "hate it" category if you...

Working Memory is the ability to hold information active in your brain for a short period of time, whilst performing other tasks, and to be able to pick up where you left off when you return to it. Working memory can be commonly confused with short term memory. Short term memory refers to the short term information required for a...

Rote learning is not the best approach for mathematics instruction.

When supporting a learner with a large skill deficit in mathematics it is tempting to skip the foundations and spend the lion's share of therapy time on getting them a passing grade. This of course is the reason why your family has sought my help - your child is failing maths and you want me to solve this problem....

"Evidence strongly suggests that timed tests cause the early onset of math anxiety for students across the achievement range."

Although writing is a more streamlined brain process than reading (it requires only encoding, whereas reading requires both encoding and decoding), there are still many aspects to skilled writing. Again, as with reading, the drain on working memory resources is significant. Breaking down the elements of writing into simpler tasks does help, but at...

The skilled reader completes multiple, concurrent tasks in order to read the words in front of him, as well as comprehend the explicit and implicit meaning of those words. When students come to me for literacy therapy, I assess whether their need lies in the area of word recognition or language comprehension - often it is a mixture of both. ...

The intentional support of executive function forms the basis of academic therapy. To ignore the impact of impaired executive functions on learning, processing, memory, and academic achievement, is like building a jigsaw puzzle with only half of the pieces. There are eight main areas of executive function: (1) impulse control, (2) emotional...

An important part of the academic therapy process is to accept the limitations of one's role as the therapist. Children who are struggling in school have been conditioned to act as passive recipients of a predetermined curriculum. In doing so they have been robbed of the opportunity to be co-creators of their knowledge and understanding. Literacy...