Does Practice Make Perfect in Math?

The saying is, “Practice makes perfect.” However, this is not necessarily true.

It’s more precise to say, “Practice makes permanent.” Only when the practice is correct does it make perfect. Practicing bad habits simply reinforces those bad habits.

This is true regarding sports, academics, and anything else. But let’s focus on math drills.

The spirit of math drills is to provide ample practice with the hope that the technique will become both permanent and correct.

This works when there is frequent feedback. Students need to have their answers checked frequently so that they can see if they are solving the problems correctly.

There is some controversy over traditional math drills. Some still embrace them, while others hate them.

The problem that teachers have with employing traditional math drills in school is that some students may become bored.

The weak students get frustrated by not being able to solve the problems, or not really wanting to learn how to solve them. Having to do things they really don’t like over and over doesn’t improve their learning.

The top students catch on quickly and get bored as soon as they’ve mastered the material.

But this doesn’t mean that math drills don’t work. There are many people who have become extremely fluent in mathematics through ample practice this way.

Teachers often strive to engage all of the students on the same activity. They want students with different learning styles, capacities, background, and interests to all get interested in the material and to all learn. To some extent they may be able to apply differentiated instruction.

Nonetheless, math fluency is severely lacking and needed with many students. Many parents turn to traditional math drills to help improve their kids’ fluency, remembering that these techniques worked well for them.

Some parents use such drills to help their gifted children advance ahead of the class. These students are bored in school, yet are engaged by the same drills that others call “boring.”

Other parents use these drills to help weaker students become more fluent through practice.

There are also still many teachers who find effective ways to use traditional drill sheets. Variety helps, both in the nature of the drill and by combining drills with other methods of instruction. Giving sheets of differing difficulty helps to improve the levels of all students.

Some home-school teachers also make extensive use of drill books.

Becoming too fluent in mathematics or learning too much math is never a problem, but lack of fluency can be a hurdle.

Chris McMullen, author of the Improve Your Math Fluency series of workbooks