Addressing the needs of low-achieving mathematics students: Helping students "trust their heads"

Abstract

This paper is based on a national intervention and research program. The program has the generic title QuickSmart because it aimed to teach students how to become quick (and accurate) in response speed and smart in strategy use. This intervention seeks to improve automaticity in students' responses, which is operationalised as students' fluency and facility with basic academic facts and procedures in mathematics. This is achieved by reducing working-memory demands on routine tasks, and freeing cognitive resources for higher-order processing, using mathematical procedures and problem solving. The QuickSmart program supports those students in their middle years of schooling identified as consistently low-achieving. The program runs for approximately thirty weeks with pairs of students involved in three thirty-minute sessions per week. Results of the program indicate that students decrease their average response times significantly, correct inaccurate or inefficient strategies, and develop less error-prone retrieval actions. The results also indicate that by the end of the program these students exhibited strong gains on standardised test scores of higher-order thinking, as well as improvements on State-wide testing measures neither of which were the focus of instruction. Finally, there is evidence that the results are sustained at least 24 months after the intervention. This paper provides the background, theoretical basis and description, of the program, as well as findings from 2006. Four important aspects of the program that we believe: contribute to its success; have important implications for classroom practice; that are most likely to facilitate improvements in students' learning; and highlight the practical and theoretical significance of having students "trust their head", are also discussed.