Long-Term Maths Learning Beats Short-Term Test Prep 

As the school terms plod on, time pressure creeps up on everyone. So, it is important to make progress early, while students are fresh from the break, before things start to pile up.  

This is an important strategy not only within terms, but also within each school year, and within a student’s entire school journey from Prep to Year 12. Especially in subjects like maths, where progress is a long-term project. Building strong foundations early sets students up for success with more advanced concepts later.  

We want to use the opportunities we have now, to avoid students falling into difficult situations down the track – but there is often pressure to do the opposite, and to take a short-term approach.  

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Stop doing what doesn’t work 

We have great sympathy for any student who decides they want to study for their Year 9 trigonometry test, but who didn’t really learn how to rearrange algebraic equations in Years 7 and 8.  

But suggesting that they focus on trigonometry for the sake of the test is like asking them to place the higher blocks of a pyramid when the lower ones are wobbly, crumbling, or missing… frustrating and demoralising (for all involved).  

With gaps in their knowledge, students won’t be getting as much out of their school lessons as they should. So, we would need to be filling gaps AND reteaching the content of their 3-5 maths lessons that week. That is a big ask for most students in just 75-minutes a week.  

Then the tests results arrive, and guess what, they’ll likely not be great. So, the student feels their efforts didn’t count for anything and doesn’t want to keep trying.  

And yet, here comes the next term and the next test. The pressure is to just repeat the whole process over again, now with an even less motivated student. So, when will we grant them the opportunity to catch up? 

Not all is lost for such students, but remediation takes time… possibly more time than we have until that test. Understandably, the longer a student has been falling behind, the longer it takes. But there are many other factors, too, such as confidence and motivation… peer pressure and puberty… sport commitments and social distractions…  

What they don’t need is the added pressure to perform in the next test. Instead, we’d be much better off letting that particular test come and go, while we instead seize the opportunity to focus our attention on achieving a more long-term goal. 

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Prevention is better than cure 

In more favourable scenarios, when we see students early enough, in primary school, or before they’ve struggled for a couple of years—before there is so much water under the bridge—we have more freedom to focus on long-term strategies to accelerate their learning.  

At ELC we prioritise the foundational concepts that will make future learning easier, while leaving more basic, less critical concepts for school to teach. Since we have limited time in each session, we want to give students the best bang for their buck. And this doesn’t often mean mirroring what school is currently teaching. 

Working with primary students, we can cover a wider range of topics. But still, we focus in and accelerate topics that will pay the biggest dividends in high school, like fractions, decimals, and algebra.  

This gives students the best shot at being drafted into the higher maths streams, with better teachers and a more motivated cohort, which gives them the choice to study advanced maths and science subjects in QCE.  

Advantages of learning ahead 

In 2020, only 20% of Queensland state school Year 12s took Mathematical Methods or higher – a crying shame, if you ask me.  

This is a real missed opportunity for many, many students, because Maths Methods opens doors to advanced STEM degrees and careers in exciting, in-demand fields of engineering… science… economics… think $$$… Those who are accepted into Methods have a clear advantage over many of their peers in this increasingly technical world. 

Students who develop a love for maths early on (rather than frequently feeling overwhelmed by it), and who consequently stay in the higher streams, can choose for themselves which maths to study for QCE: Specialist, Methods, General or Essential (ordered from most to least advanced). Those in the mid and lower streams, will have their choices limited to General or Essential. 

Unfortunately, schools don’t seem to make clear these consequences early enough, when students still have plenty of time to “catch up, keep up, and get ahead”. By the time students realise in high school that their subject options are being closed off, it is often much harder to make up ground, as students first must fill the gaps from earlier years before they can effectively tackle the current material.  

While schools drop students into lower maths streams all the time, they will rarely allow students to move up to a higher maths stream. This is because the longer a student is in the lower stream, the wider the gap becomes between them and the higher stream.  

So being drafted into the higher stream from primary school, and staying there, is by far the best strategy. 

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Catch Up, Keep Up, Get Ahead! 

If given the right time and opportunities, students can catch up and excel. But expecting to improve just by studying the content on the coming test, while the foundational content is still missing, is an exercise in frustration.  

And given the opportunity, we would much prefer to foster a student to love maths early on in their school life… teaching them ahead of their peers… so they are less likely to fall behind when they hit life’s rough patches… less likely to need maths support later in school… and more likely to have the widest choices of subjects and career pathways!