Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Education

Join the discussion on our Education forum.

Original poster

How can I get DD2 to "show her workings" in maths?

22 replies

MrsSchadenfreude · 17/05/2011 12:23

She has a "maths brain" - will look at quite complex sums and just "know" what the answer is. She can't tell me how she gets there - she just "knows" the answer. Until a few weeks ago, she was in the extended maths group, but has been put back to learn with the rest of the class, because "she needs to learn how to show her workings."

I am hopeless at maths, and really don't feel able to explain to DD2 (who is 10 - yr 5 equivalent) how to write down the process. She was doing her homework last night - multiplying fractions. She had got the answers all correct (as far as I could tell) but had put no working out down.

Teacher is, as far as I can see, not particularly interested in helping!

OP posts:
marialuisa · 17/05/2011 13:15

DD is the same age and similar. She knows the theory and has learnt to write down the steps she should be going through (although it's a bit hit and miss and she isn't convinced there's any point...) as they use continuation marking at school and she wasn't impressed at getting a low mark even though her answers were all correct. She's in the top maths set at school and I've noticed that all of a sudden we're getting 2 stage questions "what's x+y?" (one mark) "Explain how you arrived at this answer" (5 marks), so perhaps a common problem with maths-able kids?

StayingDavidTennantsGirl · 17/05/2011 13:30

Tell her that she needs to explain her workings because not all the marks in exams will be for the correct answer - some will be for demonstrating that you know the right method to find it.

Plus, if she does make a mistake, she may still get the points for having the correct method, even if she has made an arithmetical error, and ended up with the wrong answer.

That is what my father told me, and he was Head of Maths at a High School.

spanieleyes · 17/05/2011 18:42

I have a similar problem, youngest son has Aspergers and a mathematical brain to go with it! So he doesn't need to show his workings,and in addition he doesn't see why he should just for someone else's benefit! He's now doing Maths A level and his teacher are STILL struggling to get him to do it!

GrimmaTheNome · 17/05/2011 18:58

Its important to put down intermediate stages in truly multi-stage problems, as SDTG explains, but for your DD there probably isn't an intermediate stage in most primary-school problems. Its like in 'Matilda', isn't it, when she can't really explain to Miss Honey how she can multiply large numbers in her head.

I think its hard for teachers who don't have 'maths brains' to understand that trying to break the problem into smaller pieces (and especially if that entails trying to put maths into words) really may not be a good idea for all children.

Original poster
MrsSchadenfreude · 17/05/2011 23:05

Thanks for all of your replies.

I sat with her while she was doing her homework tonight - it was bang, bang, bang, all done, all correct, all done in about five minutes. No workings. There was a bonus question, which was set out more like a puzzle, where she had to explain how she reached her answer. She chewed on her pencil for a bit - she could see what the answer was going to be, straight off, wrote down the answer, then sort of worked backwards from the answer to the question. It was about slices of pizza, and she drew how she had worked it out, and then wrote the sums she had done to reach the final answer. So I think we have made some progress, but wonder if it was easier for her because it wasn't a straight sum, but about Jack's pizza and Joe's pizza and dividing both, which were cut into different numbers of slices between their friends.

OP posts:
streakybacon · 18/05/2011 07:24

In time, work will get harder and she won't be able to see the answer as instantly as she can now. She will need to work things out in stages and refer back to earlier calculations to solve the final problem. Tell her that it's a good habit to get into now, while the work is easy enough, so that she'll be prepared for more complex problems when they come along.

Also agree with telling her about exam marking - it may seem a long way ahead but this may even apply to SATS/class tests as well as GCSEs.

My son used to be dreadful for not writing out his workings (another Maths-brained Aspie here Smile), but we use Conquer Maths which shows all the workings and he just learned how to copy from there (home educated). He writes out all his answers in full now without argument.

mrz · 18/05/2011 20:31

spanieleyes my ASD son is the same he says he sees the answer and doesn't work it out.

spanieleyes · 18/05/2011 20:35

He has his maths AS level on Friday, I have my fingers crossed that he puts SOME workings in!

fluffles · 18/05/2011 20:39

would it help to tell her that at university there are people working doing maths that NOBODY knows the answer to... nobody knows if it's right or wrong because these are the FIRST people to EVER do that maths... so they have to learn to write down all the steps they go through so that people can see how they got to that answer and decide if they agree or not.

[hopefully she'll also find that quite interesting...]

noblegiraffe · 18/05/2011 20:45

Maths, in the long term, isn't really about being able to do calculations, but about being able to logically and clearly argue that your answer is the correct one.

The actual 'answer' isn't the whole of the solution. If you haven't argued the case for your answer, your solution to the problem is incomplete. You could have just guessed and coincidentally been correct; you need to show you know what you are talking about.

JenaiMarrHePlaysGuitar · 20/05/2011 11:07

This is really interesting.

Ds isn't that great at maths but he's pretty good and I just cannot persuade him to put his workings out down.

It hadn't occured to me actually that for him there aren't any steps. Which makes perfect sense - right now the maths he's doing is pretty straightforward - in a couple of years it won't be.

I'm fairly lame at arithmetic but have done a lot of programming, so the workings out thing comes naturally to me and I rather enjoy it. I need the stages.

wordfactory · 20/05/2011 11:36

A friend of ours showed DC a paper her was working on and how he could get 80% even if he got every answer wrong...it was an extreme example, but they got the point.

He also told them that maths questions have solutions not answers, that the methodology was more important.

JenaiMarrHePlaysGuitar · 20/05/2011 11:54

maths questions have solutions not answers

I like that.

AllDirections · 20/05/2011 12:02

I discussed this with DD2s (Y6) teacher who said that if there are 2 marks for a question and she gets the answer correct then she will get the 2 marks. If she doesn't get the answer correct then she could get a mark for the working out.

It's a ridiculous notion that children should have to show working out when they don't do any working out to get the answer. To work backwards is more than ridiculous!!

HarrietJones · 20/05/2011 12:30

I always struggled with this& still do. I look at sums &see the answer. I'm having this problem with dd1 now too.

GrendelsMum · 20/05/2011 12:45

I think the analogy with computer programming is a good one - you have to be able to tell the computer what steps to go through in order to achieve a result, not just know what the result is in your own head.

Naoko · 20/05/2011 20:40

I'm not a teacher so someone please correct me if this is a really poor idea, but could you suggest that she writes it down as if she were explaining how to do it to someone who doesn't understand? I used to have a similar problem in school with modern languages - I have a knack for them, just pick them up from reading/listening to them, and as a result I'm hopeless at grammar and rules. This got much better for me when my school put in a scheme where older kids with good marks tutored younger ones who were struggling for a few hours a week. Explaining it to my young tutee really helped me actually understand the foundations under what I'd been doing intuitively.

IntotheNittyGritty · 21/05/2011 10:14

t
The is interesting to read. I am having the same issues with my Dc. I believe the problem starts at primary because they are not taught from tHe beginning that they will need to show their workings. They have it drilled into them that they show a final answer, or they get worksheets and tests that is a multiple choice.

I would love to know when children are meant be taught to show workings: my Dc is year 6 but still not been told this at school

singersgirl · 21/05/2011 10:38

DS1, now in Y8, frequently gets maths homework where he is given the answers. The whole point of the homework is to show that they know how to reach the answer, and if you just put the answers down, you get zero.

It is hard at primary level when they often don't need to work stuff out. We have just mastered this with DS2, Y5, who used to think that not showing his workings proved he was clever Hmm. We've pointed out that it's much smarter to do what you're asked to do Grin.

gingeroots · 21/05/2011 11:58

Bit off message here ,but there is the tale that a child taking a SATs paper at primary school in the box labelled "show your working out " drew a little picture of herself writing ".

Made me smile .

nickelbabe · 21/05/2011 12:03

In A-level maths, it's possible to get an A without getting a single correct answer.

that's assuming that your answers are wrong because of simple calculation errors (and usually because you've roudned up too early)

this is because if you show your working out, the examiner will mark on that.

nickelbabe · 21/05/2011 12:11

anyway, in primary maths, some of the "working out" can be as simple as writing the question as a sum.

so, for example, they're asked, how many times does 12 go into 144?
we all know the answer is 12, but if she wrote it down as:

12)144 = 12, then that's showing the working out.

New posts on this thread. Refresh page
Swipe left for the next trending thread