When I’m helping an ISEE math student, I’ll just teach one or two variations of a concept at a time, then move on to another concept, then another. Experts call this technique “interleaving”. But research has shown that students learn much faster (and remember more) when they bounce around from topic to topic. The student feels smart, and I feel like an effective teacher. And it’s multiple choice, so that includes lucky guesses! I face a difficult decision: do I tackle these topics sequentially or move around from topic to topic in an upward (hopefully!) spiral?Įveryone feels better when I take the first approach – if I spend 30 minutes on quadratic equations, I can move step by step through all the variations and the student will get most of the questions right. As a result, the average 8th grader only gets about 55% of the math questions right. The Upper Level ISEE is for 8th - 10th graders, so it contains concepts like factoring, graphing quadratics, and permutations. It’s not that the math content is difficult in the absolute sense – it’s that students have learned so little of it in school. I’ve helped students with lots of difficult tests, from the SAT to the Hunter exam to Horace Mann pre-Calculus finals, but no test is as hard as the Upper Level ISEE for 8th-graders.
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