WHAT SHOULD YOU DO WITH STUDENTS WHO CONTINUALLY MAKE SIMPLE MISTAKES ON THEIR DAILY WORK?
Often, I receive telephone calls or emails from homeschool educators who express concern that their sons or daughters continue to make simple mistakes in computations when doing their daily work.
As one parent stated:
“My son is taking Algebra 1 and constantly makes silly mistakes, like forgetting to put a negative sign in front of his answer when his work clearly shows the answer should reflect a negative number. He understands the concepts well, but because of these simple, careless, errors he gets a fourth or more of the problems wrong on his daily work.”
Mistakes like those described above are normal with most students working on the daily assignment preparing for the upcoming weekly test. Have you noticed that they make fewer, if any, of these same mistakes when they take a test? I like to use the phrase that “students put on their Test Hat” when taking a test, and they will not accept the same mistakes they do on their daily practice work. However, if you reward them for making these mistakes on a test by giving them partial credit, they will continue making them on the tests as well. No matter how much we try to eliminate these mistakes, some students will never stop making them, no matter how good they become at mathematics.
That is why experienced engineers always check each other’s work before releasing a new project for testing or production. Several years ago I read in the daily newspaper that Spanish engineers working on a new submarine for the Spanish Navy did not do this verification check. After building a new submarine, it was found that the engineers had overlooked the erroneous placement of a decimal point in their computations. The embarrassing – and costly – result was that the Spanish Navy ended up with a new submarine so heavy that it would not surface if it were ever submerged.
Most students make fewer mistakes in performing simple mental arithmetic calculations on paper than they do when pressing the wrong button on a calculator, which still constitutes a human error, although the student will try to blame the calculator!
Even students looking to achieve perfection can be found guilty of “rushing” through their daily work for one reason or another. It might help to ensure students develop the habit of checking the work of the problem they just finished before moving on to the next. This process of review would enable them to find many, if not all, of these types of simple mistakes and while it may add a few minutes to the time spent on the daily assignment, it might get them to slow down a bit to avoid making them in the first place.
So long as you do not reward the student for making these simple calculation errors on the weekly tests—like giving them partial credit for using the right concept but getting the wrong answer—they will eventually overcome that shortcoming.
And if they do not, but their weekly test scores remain constantly at an 80 or better, I would not worry about it. Remember, the cumulative and repetitive nature of John Saxon’s math books and tests is what creates the mastery as opposed to other math curriculums reviewing for—and teaching—the test.
So making a few computational errors, while maintaining a minimum score of 80 on the thirty-some cumulative weekly tests, is truly outstanding. While I fully understand that everyone considers an acceptable target grade for tests at 95 – 100, receiving an 80 on one of John Saxon’s weekly cumulative math tests is equivalent to the 95 one would receive on the periodic test using some other math curriculum that teaches the test.