As teachers, you can help develop the elementary mental computational skills of your young learners. The ability to do mental computations should not be taken as insignificant or unimportant. It actually helps in the level of progress in simple mental computations that later defines the first threshold of school math’s learning ability. In other words, the ability to do mental computations is a little higher than the level of standard requirements. The pupils who were not able to cross this threshold are candidates for poor progress.
There are many secondary school pupils who have bad results in mathematics. Many experiences will point you that problems start in primary school. The cause is in bad practical skills in count and simple mental computations. Basically, students who have problems with addition and subtraction within the limits of 20 and multiplication and division within the limits of 100 cannot master many basic concepts of school math successfully. They find hardships with common fractions, simple algebraic transformations, simple equations and so on.
You should pay attention to the swiftness of computation not only in the correctness of the answers when you diagnose your student’s ability to do simple mental computations. When they have slow mental computations, this is one possible cause of failure in comprehending more complicated operations such as reducing to a common denominator, operations with brackets and similar terms, and solving simple equations.
It is not enough that your students memorize the multiplication table. There are ways to understand how it works like numbers 1 to 9 multiplied by 9 will give you answers that when you add the two numbers will give you 9. (Example: 9 x1 = 9; 2 x 9= 18 and 1 +8 = 9; 3 x9 = 27 and 2 + 7 = 9 and so on). Think of ways in which your student can learn their math easier. A students must be able to implement a sequence of 64 simple operations not only nearly errorless but quickly also. Also, remember that the speed of mental computation is one of the two criteria of automatism which is the top quality of skills alongside with the correctness of answers. . One can fail a math test because of slowness even if there will be no mistakes.
By: BERNARDITO B. CADATAL | Teacher II | Sta. Rosa Elementary School | Sta. Rosa, Pilar, Bataan
