Thursday, March 24, 2011

Weak Verbal Skills in Math

I was thinking the other day about how I ought to sit down with a couple of my 9th-graders to have an INTERVENTION on how to read test instructions. Like, maybe make them take a highlighter and highlight every verb in a question taken from an old test, so that they can make sure that they're doing all parts of the actions required. "Find ... Label ... Justify... Round..." I wondered: Are they even seeing all of those verbs and considering each one as a separate requirement of the problem?? Because the same kids that seem to never read instructions don't appear to be getting any better at it over time, and they're losing significant amounts of points every assessment because of it. --So frustrating! Argh.

Today, I got a chance to try this out on one kid who came to see me after school for help. She actually came to see me about content help in looking over a recent quiz, but I told her right away that I think that maybe part of her issue is related to her ability to interpret the instructions. So, I sat down with her and asked her to highlight the verbs in the first problem from our last quiz. To my surprise, she immediately highlighted a verb-turned-adjective in "the labeled point ..." and missed all of the important imperative verbs that actually tell her what to do! Oh, boy. I had suspected that her verbal skills were affecting her performance in math, but I had no idea to what extent until I pointed at a word she had missed highlighting, "justify", and asked her if she knew what it meant, and she said No!! Yikes!! (Especially scary because I think I use the word "justify" everyday in class, and almost certainly on every assessment.)

Of course, I explained the word to her and explained that it's OK -- and mandatory!! -- that she raises her hand to ask for clarifications on directions during a quiz/test. I also reviewed with her the idea that most key verbs occur in the beginning of a sentence, if the sentence is trying to tell you what to do. She actually knew the majority of the material on the quiz that we were looking over, but had gotten a crummy grade because she didn't follow most of the instructions (because she had interpreted them erroneously). For example, Problem 1 had asked her to determine whether an already-labeled point was either the circumcenter or the centroid of a triangle, and to justify her choice by describing the special properties of each vocab term. She had chosen the correct term, but her description went on to be very vague and failed to point out the differences between the two types of concurrency points. Part of the issue? She didn't understand that she had to support her choice by stating the differences between the two points -- because she didn't know what "justifying" meant!

Holy smack. It's making me consider calling my other struggling/verbally questionable kids in one by one, so that I can individually workshop them on reading instructions. Have you done this type of intervention before? What other strategies can I give them besides highlighting the verbs? (I don't want to give them strategies that are too time-consuming. Highlighting seems like a reasonably easy thing to do, even given limited time.)

sigh. If only I had thought of doing this earlier in the year, I wouldn't be here kicking myself now in Q4. I guess it's one of those things that you live and learn. And this is why it is absolutely critical for us to be working with our kids on verbal skills across the board. If your kids have poor verbal skills, do you think they can correctly interpret what "Segment AB bisects Segment CD" means? I said the words "subject" and "object" to my kids today in reference to that mathematical statement, and half the class looked at me blankly. I had to rephrase, "CD is the one that's receiving the action. It's the one that's being cut into 2 equal parts." Believe it or not, we are back to Grammar 101, in Geometry class, in order to move on to construct proofs correctly.


  1. Story of my life. I think I can count on 1 hand the number of students that would NOT need this type of intervention. I try it and they freak out. They won't do it. They would rather get a zero than do something like this. I have "GT" kids and I can't decide if they won't follow the directions or haven't read the directions.

  2. They freak out because they think highlighting terms in the instructions implies that there is something wrong with them? If so, I'd tell them that if they don't find a way to FIX what's going on, whatever's harming them now will always be there -- and nobody cares if you are highlighting words in the given instructions, but everybody (including every future employer) will care when you consistently cannot seem to follow directions. They seem to be choosing to fight the wrong battle, if they would rather get zeros than to try your reading intervention methods. :(