My friend sends both her children to a maths tutorial centre and tells me this has made all the difference to their achievement in school. My son is struggling a bit; should I do the same?
There are many such centres around town, and their number seems to grow with every passing month. They range from franchised operations using qualified staff following a well-structured programme to fly-by-night set-ups with few credentials.
Although you do not say which type your friend uses, it is important to note that while all such provision varies, so do the needs of individual children. Making good progress in mathematics is a complex business that requires a thorough and careful assessment of students' learning styles and stage of development.
A professional educator can then use this data to focus on how to teach students to apply skills and principles to problem-solving scenarios and real-life situations.
Parents sometimes equate the ability to calculate quickly and accurately with mathematical competence. While it is important to use a range of methods and strategies to manipulate numbers using addition, subtraction, division and multiplication, this skill has only limited impact if there is little or no understanding of the underlying concepts and the connections between them.
Good teachers will rightly stress the importance of automaticity. Thus, memorising multiplication tables and efficiently manipulating numbers up to 100 using mental arithmetic is a basic starting point, but without an understanding of place value, students will eventually hit a wall when asked to think a problem through and come up with a solution.
Similarly, even with the four basic operations, there needs to be an appreciation of the commutative law. Briefly this means that numbers can be added or multiplied in any order to get the correct answer (for example, 7x8 = 8x7).
