Researchers from the University of Missouri have found that the approach boys take to math will have them surpass girls by the end of sixth grade. They found that boys prefer to solve arithmetic problems from memory, whereas girls have a tendency to compute the answer by counting.
The study that followed 300 kids in grades one through six, found that boys in grades 1 and 2 had a tendency to answer more questions than the girls and had more wrong answers, whereas the girls responded to less questions with more correct answers. By sixth grade, the boys were answering more problems and getting more correct than the girls.
The researchers came to the conclusion that mathematical skills may be part “practice makes perfect” and “perfect makes practice”. Attempting more answers from memory gives the student more practice, which eventually leads to improvement in accuracy.
This is why K5 Math Facts not only measures the correct answers your kids provide, but also the speed by which they respond. Not only does the answer have to be accurate, but also recollected from memory, so faster than using other methods, such as counting on fingers. This will set them up to succeed in higher-order math concepts later into late elementary and high school.
Did you know that you can set your child’s mastery time? Younger kids have difficulty using a keyboard, so you may want to increase the mastery time to give them a chance to type in the answers. Here’s a video that shows you how to set the K5 Math Facts mastery time.
