A lot of students lose marks on questions they actually understand. The cause is almost always the same: they skip steps.
Where skipped steps cost marks
- Sign errors. Moving a term across the equals sign in your head is where a negative goes missing.
- No part marks. On a written question, a teacher can only give credit for work they can see. A wrong final answer with no work earns nothing.
- No way to check. If the answer looks off, there is nothing to look back at to find the mistake.
What writing it out looks like
Take a simple equation like 3(x − 4) = 2x + 5. Written out, it looks like this:
- Expand: 3x − 12 = 2x + 5
- Subtract 2x from both sides: x − 12 = 5
- Add 12 to both sides: x = 17
- Check: 3(17 − 4) = 39 and 2(17) + 5 = 39
Each line does one thing. If something goes wrong, it is easy to see exactly which line it went wrong on.
How I use this in sessions
In my sessions I write out every step on my iPad as we go, so students can see how each line follows from the one before. Then they try similar questions on paper the same way. After a few weeks it stops feeling slow and starts feeling normal, and the careless errors drop off.
If your child keeps losing marks on questions they understand, this is usually the first thing I work on. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like to try a session.