The Elephant Learning Teacher Dashboard
Elephant Learning's teacher dashboard is now released. Here is a blog walkthrough of the dashboard.
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When I was young, every summer, my mother would sit me and my sister down to learn the math concepts for the upcoming school year. Math time at our house wasn't always a calm time. There were definitely some tears, and, I'm sure, it was like pulling teeth for my mother.
Beyond us not really wanting to do math during summer vacation, there was also a fear of getting these new math concepts and problems wrong — in other words, math anxiety.
The next thing I know, I'm in fourth grade and I didn't get into the advanced math class by one point and I was fighting to get in. My math anxiety drove that competitiveness; I couldn’t, for whatever reason, not get into the class. I pushed to get ahead of my peers, learning the advanced math concepts even when I couldn’t make it into the advanced math classes in middle school.
I ended up with a computer science major, a math major and a minor in philosophy, but I still had that experience with math anxiety. I didn’t realize what it was, though, until it was explained to me.
From there, I could see how it affected me and how it affects others every day. Over the last two years, I’ve examined math anxiety, particularly how it impacts children’s understanding of basic math concepts. When used correctly, the Elephant Learning app — along with parental involvement — can effectively help your child overcome their math anxiety.
Do you think your child may deal with math anxiety? I get many questions about the causes, symptoms and solutions to math anxiety. Read on for some of my answers.
The first step in addressing math anxiety is to recognize what it looks like in the first place. When you and your child sit down to do their math homework at night, do they experience any of the following?
Are they coming home with poor test grades? When your child does get a math problem right, does it seem like they’re just guessing or reciting an answer?
Another good indicator of your child’s level of math anxiety is how they deal with a word problem. If you ask them a word problem and they don’t understand the question, this may be an indicator of math anxiety.
Try this exercise: grab a handful of the LEGOs that have four dots on top. Ask your child to give you five of those blocks and tell you how many dots there are in all. If your child counts to get the answer, do not worry; let them come up with the answer.
Ask them next: “What is 4 times 5?” This may help them connect the concept of multiplication to the memorized times tables. However, if you try any exercise like this and find your student counting, it typically indicates they have a gap in understanding the concepts and would be prone to developing math anxiety.
Questions like the above can help you determine if your child has a gap in understanding. Math Matters has a quiz at different student levels to help determine if your child has any gaps in understanding. Take the Math Matters assessment to identify your child’s current math level.
Help your child combat math anxiety by filling in the gap in understanding. Start giving your child math experiences by incorporating concepts into real-world situations. This will increase his or her confidence when they approach new, harder concepts.
This is exactly what Elephant Learning does. The entire system was built to remove math anxiety and facilitate the learning of mathematics. The app’s games are educational on their own, but if your child gets stuck, the app provides you with a series of questions to ask, which almost always gets your child over their hurdle.
Once you’ve filled the gap in understanding, the narrative of “I’m not good at math” will no longer reflect reality, and you may find increased confidence. It is important to understand the story and help children understand that it is not reality. How Do I Prevent My Child From Having Math Anxiety in the Future?
There are a few things you can do to keep math anxiety at bay in the future:
This is exactly what the Elephant Learning app does, too. It explains how it’s teaching the subject and why, then breaks the topic down further into milestones. Parents can find activities to do with their child outside of the system that teach the same concepts, so the child receives more exposure to a concept to learn it faster.
Make no mistake. Math anxiety can and does affect the course of your life. The wife of a friend said to me, "I wanted to get a degree in physics, but it was all differential equations, so I became an English major."
When she was a child, that's what she wanted to do; she wanted to be a physicist, but she gave that up because of math anxiety.
The reality is, there’s no such thing as a “not a math person.” Whether it’s you or your child, those who aren’t confident with mathematics are typically individuals who have math anxiety.
Regardless of how much math anxiety exists in your household, remember: there is a solution.
Elephant Learning's teacher dashboard is now released. Here is a blog walkthrough of the dashboard.
Many math apps are parent-free zones or, at best, parents are an afterthought within the app. Elephant Learning knows that the best results come when the parent is involved in the child’s education. Every study shows outcomes for students are better when parents are involved. The truth is, when I started this company, my first child was on his way. I created this system as a tool to ensure that he receives the benefits of mathematics education and avoids the American educational pitfall. We live in a time when, increasingly, if you are not the person creating the automation, you are the person being replaced by it. Our reports detail exactly how we intend to teach each topic down to the milestone level with advice on how you can further learning with fun games outside of the system. This turns your child’s playtime in the system into a tool to succeed in playtime with you. We provide advice on how to work with the students on mistakes so that the pressure is always off. At any point in time, if your student is struggling, we are always happy to look at the data and advise. That is why Elephant Learning can guarantee results. The math app you choose for your child’s learning matters. Apps that focus on games and graphics with math sprinkled throughout may end up turning those math problems into perceived work for your child (and can become addictive). Elephant Learning begins with a proven curriculum and scientific understanding of how children learn math. We then build games and puzzles around the curriculum, empowering students to truly grasp math concepts. Knowing that parental involvement is key to student success, we also ensure that you, the parent, are involved every step of the way.
I’m so grateful for Facebook and its business tools. We couldn’t have succeeded without it. — Aditya Nagrath, Ph.D., Co-founder, and CEO, Elephant Learning
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