The most exciting findings to come from research in recent years uncover some important aspects to learning that might surprise you! There are many myths in the world of math education that continue to leave many children unable to access the great joy and empowerment from mastering the subject. Fortunately, research in math education can help to uncover the best way to support your children to flourish in their math learning. Here are four popular myths of math learning and information on how Struggly – a web based math learning platform – can help!
Your child’s entire Struggly experience is themed around growth mindset principals, with mindset messaging throughout the platform in the mistakes messages they recieve, and the badges they earn. Our adaptive task scheduling algorithm ensures that your child is offered tasks that are right at the end of their understanding– with the encouragement and support for them to struggle and persist through.
We know that it is difficult for those in the role of “teacher” to know exactly how to teach and promote a growth mindset. This is where the Struggly parent guide really shines! While your child is logged into struggly on a desktop, laptop, or tablet, you can also be logged in to the parent guide on your own device or phone. The parent guide will update in real time with messages, questions, and hints you can say to your child to reinforce growth mindset messages, encourage their struggle without taking away the challenge, and provide just the right amount of help.
We call our app Struggly because we are all about embracing moments of struggle and mistakes as learning opportunities. As your child works through our challenging mathematics tasks, they will be encouraged to struggle and their mistakes will be celebrated as learning opportunities. Your child will earn badges for creativity, strategy, and persistence as they learn and grow.
We know that it can be hard to know what to say or do to support your when they are struggling. Sometimes, it feels like the best thing to do is to show them how to get the right answer. But in actuality, this takes away the learning opportunity. Struggly features a guide for parents that runs simultaneously to whatever your child is working on. The guide provides you with suggestions and hints for how to support your child through their struggle, without removing the challenge completely.
At Struggly, our tasks are designed with this exact research finding in mind. We know that our brains do the best learning when multiple connections and representations are explored and understood. We design our tasks to challenge children to explore math concepts in creative and visual ways, providing lots of opportunities for making connections across representations (a.k.a. brain connections!). Take the concept of ½. A person with many brain connections about fractions can think of ½ in many different ways: one out of two items, a square shaded halfway, one cup of sugar to two cups of flour, a cookie shared by two people, three people in a family of six, and so on!
Struggly is guided play! Our tasks are child-led: the first level of each task serves as a tutorial where the child learns the challenge of the task and the rules of play, simply by trying it out! The parent guide ensures that you are aware of the learning goal of the task and prepared with questions, hints, and prompts that are relevant to how your child is responding to the task.
Catching these four myths in action can be useful learning opportunities and Struggy can help prove to you and your child that they just aren’t true. We hope that you have found this information helpful as wish you Happy Struggling!
1 Chestnut, E. K., Lei, R. F., Leslie, S. J., & Cimpian, A. (2018). The myth that only brilliant people are good at math and its implications for diversity. Education sciences, 8(2), 65.
2 Sarrasin, J. B., Nenciovici, L., Foisy, L. M. B., Allaire-Duquette, G., Riopel, M., & Masson, S. (2018). Effects of teaching the concept of neuroplasticity to induce a growth mindset on motivation, achievement, and brain activity: A meta-analysis. Trends in neuroscience and education, 12, 22-31
3 Schroder, H. S., Fisher, M. E., Lin, Y., Lo, S. L., Danovitch, J. H., & Moser, J. S. (2017). Neural evidence for enhanced attention to mistakes among school-aged children with a growth mindset. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 24, 42-50.
4 Steuer, G., Rosentritt-Brunn, G., & Dresel, M. (2013). Dealing with errors in mathematics classrooms: Structure and relevance of perceived error climate. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 38(3), 196-210.
5 Boaler, J., Chen, L., Williams, C., & Cordero, M. (2016). Seeing as understanding: The importance of visual mathematics for our brain and learning. Journal of Applied & Computational Mathematics, 5(5), 1-6.
6 Skene, K., O’Farrelly, C. M., Byrne, E. M., Kirby, N., Stevens, E. C., & Ramchandani, P. G. (2022). Can guidance during play enhance children’s learning and development in educational contexts? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Child Development.
We appreciate our friends at Struggly for sharing with us this week. You can save 33% on your Struggly subscription here at the Club.