Computational Skills

Elementary Mental Computational Skills and Success in School Math
By Victor Guskov

To teachers and parents: if your children have problems in mathematics, reed this article, please. Maybe the cause of the difficulties is very simple.

For success in school mathematics it is necessary to master elementary mental computational skills at first. This statement is obvious not only for teachers. Everybody knows that addition and subtraction within the limits of 20, multiplication and division within the limits of 100 are the foundation of all next arithmetical and algebraic topics. But my practice shows that a level of the skills, which maybe is suitable for primary school, very often is insufficient for secondary school.

During last twenty years I investigated why some pupils can not study mathematics successfully. Now I am sure – the first of the causes is poor mental arithmetic. If elementary mental computational skills are not enough good, a pupil has no chances to understand and master more complicated topics.

How can we diagnose a lack of the skills? The answer seems very simple. Mental computations must be swift and errorless. We may say that the skills must be driven to automatism (the top quality of skills) which means quick and errorless mental implementation of the simple arithmetical operations.

Thus the computational speed is the first criterion of the automatism. Meanwhile an error may be caused not only by lack of skills. There are many other outside causes - a bad condition of a pupil, a brief distraction of attention and so on. Therefore a probability of occurrence of an error, which must be sufficiently low but not equal to zero, must be taken as the second criterion.