Group items tagged

experience a weak understanding or lack a comprehension of conceptshave very poor number sense skillsexperience difficulty with pictorial representationshave poorly controlled handwritingexperience confusion with arrangements of numerals and signs on textbook/workbook pages

Using structured, concrete, and hands-on materials is important in tying these links between concepts. This strategy not only applies to elementary grades, it is also vital during concept development stages of higher-level math.

When these problems are accompanied by a need for strong conceptual grasp of mathematical and spatial relations, it is imperative that students are not focusing only on remediating computation.

Mazzocco and her colleagues previously found that the ability to estimate approximate quantities without counting generally improves during childhood and is related to math achievement

Mazzocco’s group studied 71 ninth-graders whose math abilities had been tested annually since kindergarten. Students completed two quantity estimation tasks. In one series of trials, participants saw an array of blue and yellow dots flash for a fraction of a second on a computer screen and indicated whether more blue or yellow dots had appeared. In other trials, students saw nine to 15 yellow dots flash on a screen and estimated how many dots were shown.

Mazzocco’s group studied 71 ninth-graders whose math abilities had been tested annually since kindergarten. Students completed two quantity estimation tasks. In one series of trials, participants saw an array of blue and yellow dots flash for a fraction of a second on a computer screen and indicated whether more blue or yellow dots had appeared. In other trials, students saw nine to 15 yellow dots flash on a screen and estimated how many dots were shown.

"We still don't have an accurate way to determine who's dropping out," he said, citing studies that estimate L.A. Unified's four-year high school dropout rate at more than 50%. (The state-calculated dropout rate for L.A. Unified is 26.1%.)

Statewide, about 3.5% of eighth-graders — 17,257 in all — left school and didn't return for ninth grade

Overall, 74.4% of California high school students graduated in four years, according to state data; 18.2% dropped out. The remainder were still in school (6.6%), were in non-diploma programs for disabled students (0.5%) or left high school by taking the General Educational Development (GED) Test (0.4%).