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Careless Errors on Math Tests


Guest Kmks71
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My 9 yo son homeschools 2 days a week and attends school/traditional classroom 2 days a week. School is using Saxon Math 6/5 for 4th grade.

 

Kids are assigned every other problem out of 30 in the mixed practices. Son is making mostly careless errors and misses 6 to 8 problems. I have made adjustments in how we handle work at home but don't have any idea what can be done to help him minimize careless errors on the tests which are taken at school. He understands concepts but grades are dropping in math. We deal with attention challenges that are typical of the age.

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In order to use Saxon correctly, they should be assigning ALL of the problems, not just the odds or evens.  If they feel they must skip problems, then they should assign every other problem set in its entirety.  

 

The other thing is that kids should be placed in the Saxon program so that the problem sets are on the easy side, otherwise they get bogged down in the zillions of problems very quickly.  If your son is in 4th grade and doing Saxon 6/5, that may be contributing to the problem.

Edited by EKS
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EKS, thank you for the reply. As far as the tests go, they work all the problems. I can work with him on homework to minimize mistakes but can't help him during the test at school. Just wondering if anyone has found solutions to similar problems at test time.

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I guess my point is that he needs to be placed correctly and then get the correct amount and type of practice in order to do well in the program (and on tests).

 

Another thing that might help is if you check each problem he does for homework right after it is done and then have him correct it immediately if it is wrong.  This helps kids learn where there errors are happening and reinforces correct habits.

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How does he feel about his grades dropping due to careless mistakes. Most times my kids will check for careless mistakes on outside class tests but they aren't aiming for a perfect score so they still let slip a careless mistake or two.

 

Some kids may not care until an A grade drop to a C grade. Some kids totally ignore grades. Some kids would get upset over not getting As.

 

We can remind kids to check for careless mistakes before letting us grade their work but they are less likely to check without prompting for a test unless the grade means something to them.

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My DD is 7 and was making a lot of careless errors in math. Because she is so young, I didn't really even try to address this until the past month, when it was clear that she was developmentally capable of showing more sustained attention to her math.  This month I started "incentivizing" (bribing??) her by introducing an allowance. (Up til now we have not given our kids an allowance).  She can earn up to $1 per day if she gets all the problems right.  The number of careless mistakes has decreased dramatically. As another poster mentioned, it also helps if I check her work immediately after and have her correct it immediately.  I told her that the purpose of the allowance was to help her with this specific area of being more careful and that once she has improved on this, we may move the incentive to a different area.

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I've got one like this; she's 13, has been doing Saxon since 6/5, and is currently in Saxon Algebra I.  Some things we have used to keep her errors down were colored pencils for positives/negatives, using graph paper to help her line up her columns with addition/multiplication, making sure she worked in a low-distraction setting, having her work on math when she was at her best (not tired, not rushed, not later at night), showing *all* work line-by-line, double-checking work, and the granddaddy of them all, telling her for each problem she missed due to careless errors, she would have to do one additional problem from the supplementary section in the back of the book.  FWIW, I think the working when she was not tired/rushed, showing all her work, and the extra-problem threat were most effective.  I think DD's main problem is that she is always looking to move on to her next activity and she is rushed, so she tried to blow through the work too fast.  When a grade is on the line (like with the tests), her paper is in the 90-100 range.

EKS, thank you for the reply. As far as the tests go, they work all the problems. I can work with him on homework to minimize mistakes but can't help him during the test at school. Just wondering if anyone has found solutions to similar problems at test time.

 

Edited by reefgazer
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I am thinking about test taking strategies like highlighting key information...answer needs to be in dollars; how much change is leftover if Lisa buys TWO erasers for .69 EACH; measurement question data is in CENTIMETERS but the ruler graphic is in MILLIMETERS.

 

I plan to ramp up his basic fact practice.

 

He is beginning to worry about grades as he matures. But I think he needs test taking strategies.

 

I also find it frustrating that the book has problems from many, many lessons in each mixed practice, quite a few of which are not included on the next test. So, we spend a lot of time and energy correcting those problems.

 

Overall, he gets concepts quickly and remembers them well but ultimately he just wants to get thru the assignment list for the day as quickly as possible so he can do something else. Typical for the age I think.

 

And yes, we have the entire set of books at home...Tests and worksheets, the lesson book and the solutions book.

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My eldest has been like that. The best thing for him has been having him write out *all* the work step by step in a maths notebook if it didn't fit on the page, followed by having him explain to me each problem he missed and how he could have caught and corrected it before being 'done', showing him how to check his work, and - after a particularly bad careless errors test - I gave him additional work to do after his usual math - one similar problems for each he had gotten wrong with the goal [my eldest is all about goals] that if he could get a problem type right 5 days in a row, I'd drop that type off his additional work. The goal not only got him to focus but showed me what was actually just careless mistakes and what he really needed additional instruction on. 

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I have my daughter do the odd problems.  Maybe editions vary, but hers (2nd edition) is set up that way, so problems 1 and 2 are similar, 17 and 18 are similar, etc.  The answers to the odds only are in the back of the book, so it certainly does seem like it's set up for the student to only need to do half the problems in order to practice the full range of concepts, with the evens being for students who need additional practice.  At any rate, I'm comfortable with her doing just the odds, especially since it spirals SO much and will come back to a type of problem over and over again.  We also saw a higher rate of careless errors when she did all thirty problems because by the upper levels, even problems where she gets the concepts easily are just long and tedious.

 

My rule is that if she gets more than two wrong on a problem set, she has to go back and do the evens on that set as well.  That works well if she isn't understanding a concept, because then she gets in the additional practice, but it is annoying for her to have to do that extra work for a careless error.  When I instituted that rule, I watched careless errors drop quickly!  Fwiw, people here also suggested that I have HER check her work when she finishes a set, rather than ME checking it and reporting to her how many she missed.  Surprisingly, that also made a difference.  The same rule applies for a test: more than 2 wrong (less than 90%) on the test, and she does all thirty problems for the next several problem sets.

 

We did work a lot on organization.  Little things like: leave a line between each problem.  Circle the problem number.  Use more lines and more paper rather than squish things together.  Go back over your work and check to make sure that you have an answer for each problem, and see if it makes sense.  On a test, if you need to work a problem on the back or on separate paper, put a box around the work for a problem, and put the problem number next to the work so that you can refer back to it.

 

(Also, fwiw, DD says she can't do math at night or too late in the afternoon.  She can get through other subjects like writing later, even if they're not her strongest subjects, but for math, she says she just doesn't have the organizational skills to do math, which is a fairly strong subject for her, as in she gets the concepts pretty easily, late in the day.  So even though she gets the overall concept, remembering the steps, especially now that she's in algebra, is hard later in the day.  So do play around with time of day too, and see if that helps.)

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My boys went through that around age 10 or so. Some of it was simply wanting to finish so they could do something else; some of it was a failure to attend to what they were doing. The more problems that look alike the easier it gets to put it on autopilot. 

We worked on slowing down.There was no incentive for finishing early. That probably helped the most. I also had them check their own answers. We use CLE and the teacher's manual has the solutions with work shown. If they missed something they were not allowed to erase it until they had checked to find out where their error had been made. 

We still get some foolish mistakes, but far fewer than we used to.

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