Discover the insider tips and tricks to boost your maths skills from the experts at Stanford University. Check out my exclusive summary from the online course here!
How to Learn Maths For Students (Part 1)
Busting a common maths myth
How our brains learn
Beliefs and messages matter
Embrace mistakes and struggles
It’s not about speed
A team of Stanford students went out onto the streets of San Francisco to ask people what they thought of maths. Most people’s view of maths can be summed up as:
“...math is a lot of methods and rules that have to be remembered. An individual subject, monotonous, too abstract and not linked to life. Best learned alone with a book or teacher. All about right and wrong answers not about interpretation. It has no opportunities for creativity. And it’s about being fast with numbers.”
The course aims to disprove these negative ideas about maths, and reveal the true nature of maths; Seeing maths as a living subject and the important role it plays in our lives.
Busting a common maths myth
People think they are either good with numbers or not. They think that only some people can be good at maths or have a gift for maths. But this is not true.
It’s likely your child has been influenced by this myth because it’s everywhere, on TV, in books and in our classrooms. Just think about how the people you know react to maths. Perhaps your child thinks they’re not good with numbers because they’ve been told they’re not.
It turns out everyone is born with the innate ability to do well in math. Whether you do well or not in maths comes from the experiences you have, and the beliefs you hold. There’s no such thing as a ‘maths person’.
How our brains learn
The best way to convince our children, there’s no such thing as a maths person, is to teach them about how the brain learns and grows.
Scientists now know that the brain changes throughout our lifespan, a process called plasticity. The brain can rewire itself and grow in a short space of time. It doesn’t mater how old you are, the brain has the ability to change and grow.
One of the best ways to grow your brain is to challenge it. The more you practice and return on an idea, the stronger the pathways of that connection become in the brain.
“This is how learning works. When you learn something a synapse fires in your brain, like an electric current. And the pathways formed by the synapse are like water in the sand. The more you return to an idea, the stronger the pathways gets. If you don’t go back to it, it will wash away…”
– Jo Boaler, Professor of Mathematics Education at Stanford University
Another way to explain this is to think of the brain like a muscle. The more you work that muscle, the more it grows. Just like working out in a gym.
If you’re trying to build muscles, using the same size weight is not going to grow the muscles. You’ll have to keep increasing the weights to build bigger muscles. This is the same with maths, the harder you think and the more you struggle with an idea, the more your brain grows.
This means everyone has the potential to become good at maths if they want to.
Beliefs and messages matter
Researchers have shown that our beliefs about our abilities and the type of mindset we hold, can have an impact on our learning.
The course highlights the importance of having a growth mindset, based on the research by psychologist and Stanford University researcher, Dr Carol Dweck.
If you have a growth mindset, you believe that your abilities and intelligence increases with hard work. Whereas if you have a fixed mindset you believe that you are either smart or not, and you can’t change your basic level of intelligence with hard work.
Some people tend to have a growth mindset in some areas such as sports. They believe they will get better at soccer if they practice and work harder. But then have a fixed mindset about maths, thinking that they will never get better because they’re led to believe they’re not a maths person.
Studies have shown that people with a growth mindset do better in maths. This is because growth mindset people behave in helpful ways when they come across difficulties. They’ll try harder and longer because they don’t think that trying hard means they’re not smart.
When they make a mistake they don’t think it means they can’t do maths, they see it as a learning opportunity. It makes them try harder. They persist rather than giving up when something is difficult.
One of the ways some people develop a fixed mindset is by being praised for their abilities and intelligence like, “You’re so smart.”
It feels good to be called smart initially but when they fail—and everyone fails—they’ll start to think maybe they’re not so smart after all. So they become worried about failing in the future because this will show them up. This leads to acting in ways to safeguard being ‘smart’ by not choosing anything that might challenge them.
As we’ve seen in the brain evidence on learning, the best way to grown your brain and get ‘smarter’ is by challenging it and choosing to tackle hard problems. So having a growth mindset is crucial for our children to get better at maths.
Not only do we need to be mindful when we praise our children but also the messages we give them.
In one research study, it showed that someone can give you a message and it can immediately change what you think about yourself and what you think you can do.
When parents told their children, “I didn’t do well in maths at school so don’t worry!”, it had a detrimental impact on their children’s maths learning. Their achievement levels actually went down in the same term.
This research also found that when teachers gave students feedback on an essay saying, “I’m giving you this feedback because I believe in you”, the students achievement levels rose at the end of the year.
So it’s important for our children to know that we believe in them and hold high expectations for them. Whilst we can’t control the messages at school and elsewhere, we can control what we say to our children.
Embrace mistakes and struggles
One key takeaway from this course which surprised me was this—when you make a mistake in maths your brain grows. You don’t need to get the right answer, you just need to struggle, and think about the mistake for synapses to fire. But when you get work correct no brain growth happens.
The course gives two examples of famous people to illustrates the benefits of struggle and mistake.
First example was Thomas Edison, who invented the light bulb over a hundred years ago. As you can imagine it was not easy inventing a light bulb nor was it an overnight success. He made 1000 mistakes but he kept trying until he succeeded. He’s known for saying, he didn’t fail 1000 times, rather he was taking steps.
Second example, to illustrate the importance of taking on hard challenges, was Michael Jordan. He was a six-time NBA champion and is well known for saying: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
It’s important to find examples of famous people, that are of interest or relevant to your child, to illustrates these points. For my daughter, I’ll talk about J K Rowling and how she, through failure and struggle (and many rejections from publishers), achieved great success.
Having a growth mindset is important, not just in school but also in other areas.
There’s a lot of evidence to support the importance of mistakes. A research into the difference between successful and unsuccessful business people found that the successful people did more of these things:
- Try seemingly wild ideas
- Feel comfortable being wrong
- Are open to different experiences
- Play with ideas without judging them
- Keep going through difficulties
- Are willing to be go against traditional ideas.
Based on the research on the importance of struggle, what can we do to create opportunities for our children to tackle challenging work that causes them to struggle and experience important brain growth? How can we support and encourage mistakes so it feels comfortable and becomes part of learning?
It’s not about speed
We tend to perceive people who are fast maths thinkers to be the better or smarter. Often speed is encouraged in maths classes with timed tests, speed-related online games and flash cards. It rarely results in faster maths thinking.
Some children experience stress in timed situations and find they can’t access their working memory. This results in poor achievements, which causes them to question their maths ability, and for many, sets off maths anxiety.
Doing well in maths isn’t about being quick. In fact, the world’s top mathematicians are some of the slowest maths thinkers. For example, the late mathematician and Fields Medal winner, Laurent Schwartz, thought he was unintelligent during his school years because he was a slow maths thinker.
It highlights that to be a strong mathematical thinker, it’s not about being fast. It’s more important to deeply understand things and their relations to each other by asking questions like:
- Why does this work?
- How is this method connected to other methods?
- What would a drawing of this situation look like?
If your child is a slow maths thinker, they shouldn’t be put off by people who may be faster. Encourage them to think deeply and to fully understand things.
Read Part 2 where I summarise the learning strategies the course covers that will help anyone become a strong mathematical thinker, and achieve at the highest level.
