Struggling Math Students: What Elementary Teachers Don’t Know About Working Memory (& other areas) with Becky Lord and Christina Tondevold

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists today let’s take a look at 5 Cognitive Areas that Impact Math Instruction.  When your students are struggling with math there might be a few things that we elementary educators might not know to watch out for.

Most of us who went into elementary education got some classes on the content and a lot on how to teach.  What we did NOT get much of was the brain side of things: how kids actually take in and process mathematical information.

So I sat down with Becky Lord of LordMath.com to talk about five cognitive areas that affect math learning.  If you have students who look lost before they even start, or who can follow steps but never see the pattern, this is for you.  And if you work with a team, share it to get the conversation started.

The five cognitive areas

Becky groups the five areas in a way that made them click for me.  There’s what the capacity and speed of the brain is (Working Memory & Processing Speed), what the thinking is made of (Verbal Comprehension & Visual Processing), and how we learn new things and make connections (Fluid Reasoning).

1. Working memory: where the thinking happens & capacity we have for thinking

Working memory is the space in the brain (mostly the frontal lobe) where active thinking happens.  Information comes in through our senses, gets combined with what we pull from long-term memory, and that’s where learning gets created.

Working memory is LIMITED.  Becky shared that the average adult can handle about three to five items at once.  For students, about three is a good goal.  And students with working memory weaknesses may only be able to handle two, or even one.

2. Processing speed: how quickly the brain works

Processing speed is how quickly the brain can process information, and it varies from person to person.  As Becky put it, “It doesn’t mean the level of intelligence a student has, just how quickly their brain works.”

Some students process quickly, some are average, some are slower.  Either way, we need to watch how much we’re asking them to process at once.

3. Verbal comprehension: the language in our heads

If working memory is where thinking happens and processing speed is how fast, verbal and visual are WHAT that thinking is.  Verbal is the language side, the voice in your head that narrates your thinking.

4. Visual processing: the pictures in our heads

Visual is the pictures and images we hold in our minds and process as we think.  Becky pointed out that when students are thinking, we want them to have BOTH a strong visual and strong language to go with it.

5. Fluid reasoning: figuring out new situations

Fluid reasoning is the brain’s ability to figure out new situations where we can’t rely on prior knowledge.  It’s making connections, interpreting, using logic and seeing patterns. It’s a big part of learning anything new, and it varies a lot from student to student.

How to ensure all kids see a way into math

Becky gave us an easy way to remember the difference between right and left hemisphere, left is all the Ls.  It’s linear, linguistic, and logical. 

We’ve thought of math as a very “left brain” subject and that some people are just “math people” because they are more left brained. And if you think of math as linear steps, sure, that’s left brain. But if you think of math as understanding the QUANTITY, as a picture of how much there is, or as a visual like an area model, that’s the right hemisphere.

“Our innate number sense is actually more right hemisphere-based.… You don’t get strong number sense through language. You get it through strengthening the visuals.” — Becky Lord

People have always said things like “I’m left brained,” “I’m right brained,” “I’m a math person,” “I’m not a math person.”  Really, we use ALL of our brain.  I think a lot of us have seen ourselves as non-math people because math was taught in only that linear way.  Bringing in more visuals helps ALL kids feel like they can approach mathematics.

How to help struggling math students

Becky’s first step is simple: observe your students closely.  Do they look confused?  Are they struggling to get started?  Getting stuck partway through an assignment?

Then ask questions that feel open, welcoming and safe, like “Tell me what we’re doing,” “What did you learn?” or “What are you going to do first here?”  The answers tell you whether a student knows what to do or is confused.

Here’s what Becky says to look for in each area:

One tricky spot: a student who struggles with verbal comprehension may not be able to explain their thinking to you.  So it can be hard to HEAR what’s going on, even when you’re listening closely.

The #1 Thing to Change to Help Struggling Math Students

Becky’s biggest recommendation helps with ALL five areas: be as clear and concise as you can.

“Sometimes, being very well-intended teachers, we actually overload our students with information.” — Becky Lord

That overload can be a lot of talking, a lot of directions or explanations, or a lot of words on a worksheet.  Becky even sees it on classroom walls.  The more information we give students to process, the more likely their working memory gets overloaded or their processing speed can’t keep up.

That doesn’t mean skipping vocabulary.  Teach the important math words and help students understand them.  But cut the extra words wherever you can, so students get the most important language and not a lot of noise.  It is also helpful to give them sentence frames to increase their use of vocabulary and verbal processing.

Look at your worksheets and slides

Visuals are GREAT, when they help with the math.  Picture a page of math problems plus directions and clip art.  For a kid who struggles with visual processing, that’s a lot to pay attention to, even on something as simple as a worksheet.

Becky’s number one adjustment is white space.  When you plan a worksheet or slide, ask:

• How can I shorten the language and directions?
• Is there one really clear visual that conveys the concept?
• Is there enough white space to draw attention to what matters, and room for the student to do their work?

Rethink your anchor charts

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Becky suggested cutting anchor charts down to the vocabulary word, a very short description and one really good picture.

So instead of “Step 1, do this. Step 2, do this,” or a chart with five different strategies, think about the word decomposing and a picture of what decomposing looks like at your grade level.  The picture communicates the concept better than words alone, and it’s far less overwhelming.

Make the patterns impossible to miss

Math has a long history of teaching concepts in isolation.  Some kids naturally see the connections anyway.  That’s fluid reasoning at work.  But a lot of kids don’t.

Becky’s answer is to set up a sequence of problems INTENTIONALLY, and she likes to do it visually, not symbolically.  Take adding 9. Build a visual, then notice: What am I doing every time? I’m always taking one to make ten.  Becky repeats it until it becomes really obvious to every student, then helps them generalize it into a strategy.

One of my favorite ways to do this is a number string (or problem string, as Pam Harris calls them).  The repetition helps kids see the pattern and gives you a chance to make it explicit. 

Students who struggle with fluid reasoning often don’t notice that every time there’s a 9, you can move one.  And they don’t connect +9 to +19 or +39 unless we help them.

Becky learned the visual version of this idea from Mahesh Sharma, who describes how a pattern emerges:

1. The first time something happens, it’s an incident.
2. The second time, it’s a coincidence.
3. The third time, a pattern emerges.
4. The fourth time, you start to test that pattern.

Ask short questions, then really listen

To support reasoning without overwhelming students with language, keep questions short and direct: “What do you notice?” “What are we doing every time?”  Then give the student a chance to respond.

Becky asks questions for two reasons.  They stimulate the student’s thinking and help them notice things.  And she’s genuinely curious about the answer, because it shows her the student’s thinking and tells her what question to ask next.

Where to go from here

You don’t need a whole new curriculum to support these five areas.  Start by taking things AWAY: fewer words, fewer directions, cleaner pages, clearer math visuals.  Then set up patterns on purpose so every student can see them.

Watch the full conversation with Becky linked up at the top of the page.

If you’re like me and need to brush up on the brain side of learning math, or learn it for the first time, check out Becky’s work at LordMath.com.  Her online course, Decoding Math, runs as a live yearly cohort starting towards the end of October.  It’s especially helpful if you teach students who have difficulty learning math.  It goes deeper into the cognitive side, the neuroscience, teaching methods, and IEPs. https://www.lordmath.com/decoding-math-live/ 

I hope this helped you build your math mind so you can build the math minds of students.