Thinking Freely Volume 1 Issue 3

 3 Ways to Help Adults Learn Math

1) Focus on confidence – most adult education programs focus only on competence, not confidence.  However without confidence, the students often resist learning and never achieve the competence.

2) Show relationships between math topics - Mathematics is generally taught as discrete topics.  In reality everything is inter-related.  By learning these relationships, math makes more sense, which in turn helps with confidence and competence.

3) Allow students to discover as they learn - Most math courses are taught with memorization.  Memorization leads to forgetting.  Students who learn through discovering on their own retain the material.