Natalie’s journey from achieving 60% to 100% in Math

Natal­ie joined our P5 Math­e­mat­ics class at the start of 2022. She had been doing well in P4, scor­ing 90 and above. How­ev­er, in her first P5 weight­ed assess­ment, she only scored a total of 60%.

Con­fused as to why there was a sud­den drop in grades, her mum decid­ed to enlist the help of Think Teach Acad­e­my, hop­ing for Natal­ie to be able to score AL1s for Maths again.

In our first les­son with her, we reviewed her P5 weight­ed assess­ment and was able to diag­nose that she was able to apply the Mod­el-Draw­ing tech­nique to the Whole Num­ber word prob­lems, but was not con­fi­dent in tack­ling sums that involved frac­tions and ratios. After sev­er­al lessons, Natal­ie shared with us that she came to realise her pre­ferred method of Mod­el-Draw­ing was not able to help her solve most of the high­er-order Paper 2 Frac­tion and Ratio prob­lem sums that she had encoun­tered in TTA’s Math work­sheet.

For exam­ple, the ques­tion below is a high­er order Frac­tion and Ratio prob­lem sum com­mon­ly seen in Pri­ma­ry 5 Math papers. Most stu­dents will always find it intu­itive to use Mod­el Draw­ing to solve such a ques­tion. How­ev­er, as this ques­tion is more com­plex than the usu­al Mod­el Draw­ing ques­tion, stu­dents will usu­al­ly get stuck and not know how to pro­ceed to solve even with the mod­els drawn.

For the ques­tion above, Natal­ie was taught how it can be solved using the Before-Change-After tech­nique as fol­lows:

In Think Teach Acad­e­my, we teach our stu­dents to iden­ti­fy ques­tion types regard­less of the pro­por­tions used in the ques­tion and to apply the effec­tive tech­niques con­sis­tent­ly. For Natalie’s case, we start­ed to expose her to oth­er tech­niques such as the Before-Change-After and Repeat­ed Enti­ty. With time, she was able to under­stand how such tech­niques could be applied regard­less of whether the prob­lem sums are in whole num­bers, ratio or frac­tion. She was able to change her mind­set and start­ed hav­ing a struc­tured approach in tack­ling prob­lem sums which was able to give her con­sis­tent results.

When we moved to the top­ic of Per­cent­age, because of the good foun­da­tion that we had set for Natal­ie in Frac­tions and Ratio, she was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to find that the past tech­niques taught to her could also be applied in the Per­cent­age top­ic! We are glad that she could appre­ci­ate our approach to Math and have made good improve­ments. A jump of grades from 60% to 100% in her recent P5 weight­ed assess­ment is impres­sive

If you would like to learn more of such tech­niques, you can watch and learn from our teach­ing video here.