All About The Metrics

One of my Math students has struggled with her times tables in the past, and that was the first thing her parents asked me to work on. To help her learn them, I took some old business cards of mine and created makeshift flash cards, covering all of the multiplication combos from 2 x 2 right through 12 x 12, just skipping the 10 x __ set since those are so easy.

For the last several weeks, whenever we've had a session, I've added another set of the cards to the mix, starting with the 5 x group and then the 9 x set (both of which are pretty easy for kids to learn) and expanding out from there. She recently hit the point where we'd covered all of them, although a non-trivial number of individual combinations still hadn't been memorized by her just yet.

Last week I decided it was time to introduce a metric by which I could tell if she was really still continuing to get better at her times tables. So I started up a new game that we'll play every session for the foreseeable future. In it, she gets 3 minutes during which I randomly flip over multiplication cards as fast as she can provide the right answer. At the end of that time, we count up how many cards (out of a total of 110) she managed to get through. I'm allowing her to "pass" a couple of times each game, just so that she doesn't get completely stuck on one question and spend the whole remaining time on it. The goals of the exercise are to measure whether her recall of the results will speed up over time (showing that she really does have them memorized and can call them up at will), and to reinforce the times tables themselves so that she doesn't just forget them again. Since I'll be recording the results each time, I can also graph them and show her and her parents how she's doing.

My expectation is that she'll increase for awhile and then plateau at some reasonably-adept level (maybe, 60 - 90 cards, as that would represent an average of 2 - 3 second reaction time per card, allowing that it takes me half a second or more to flip the card and recognize that she's given me the right answer). But of course all of that remains to be seen, as it's still very early days.

I realized I needed something like this because I can't simply rely on marks achieved in school tests for my metrics as I do in other areas. Therefore this seemed like a good approach, and exactly the type of activity that I hope to dream up more of as time goes by.