I used to get lots of calls and emails from parents about their children’s “careless mistakes.”
I understand. When you see your child make the same mistake for the third time, it’s frustrating.
But here’s something I want you to know:
I make mistakes, too.
I’m Nicole the Math Lady, and I make plenty of mistakes!
The difference is that I’ve done enough math over the years that I can often catch myself.
I’ll look at something I’ve written and think:
Wait…that doesn’t look right.
Something doesn’t make sense. So I stop and go back to figure out what happened.
That’s the skill I want for your student.
Not perfection.
The ability to catch a mistake.
What happens when we make a mistake?
When your student gets a problem wrong, they’ve just given you something really valuable: a look at how they’re thinking.
Instead of immediately giving them the correct answer, try asking:
“Show me what you were thinking.”
Then let them walk you through their work.
Maybe they’ll spot the mistake themselves.
Maybe they’ll need a little help.
Either way, something important is happening: they’re comparing what they thought was correct with what actually works.
And research suggests that this kind of active error analysis can be a powerful way to learn.
In one study of 208 middle-school students learning decimals, students who practiced identifying, explaining, and correcting errors performed better on a test a week later than students who simply solved similar problems and received feedback. They were also better at judging whether their own answers were correct.
That’s a pretty big deal.
We’re not just trying to get the answer right.
We’re helping students learn to recognize when something isn’t right.
Learning to monitor your own thinking
There’s a name for this skill: metacognition.
It’s essentially being able to think about your own thinking.
In math, that might sound like:
Does this answer make sense?
Did I follow the right steps?
Where did I go wrong?
Is there another way I could solve this?
A 2024 meta-analysis looked at 147 studies involving more than 698,000 students and found a significant positive relationship between metacognition and mathematics achievement.
In other words, being able to monitor and evaluate your own thinking is an important part of becoming a stronger math student.
And it’s something students can practice.
This is why I love the Trouble Spots Report
The Trouble Spots Report gives you a wonderful opportunity to practice this with your student.
There, you can:
See your student’s original answer.
See every answer they tried afterward.
Award a point if you need to.
Find the reset button – in case you’d like them to try the question (or other questions) again.
So instead of saying:
“Here’s the answer. You did this wrong.”
you can say:
“Let’s look at this together. Show me what you were thinking.”
Then ask:
“Can you find where things went wrong?”
You’re giving your student a chance to do the thinking.
And if they can’t find the mistake, that’s when you step in and help.
Research on learning from errors supports this approach: errors followed by appropriate corrective feedback can promote learning, and asking students to explain errors can help them process the underlying mathematics more deeply.
You have tools to help
You don’t have to know how to explain every problem yourself.
That’s why we give you several ways to help your student.
Use the Solutions Manual.
It gives you a high-level walk-through of the problem and helps you understand how it should be solved.
Watch Nicole’s lesson.
Go into your Parent Portal and watch the lesson your student was taught. You’ll hear exactly how Nicole explained the concept and can use that same approach when you work together.
Join Nicole’s Facebook group.
You can post a math problem there and have fellow parents chime in with an answer. All answers are reviewed by our team for correctness.
Then come back to the problem and let your student try again.
Why catching the mistake matters
Here’s the part I really want you to remember:
One wrong answer isn’t a big deal.
But if a student keeps using the same incorrect approach without realizing it, that mistake can become part of the way they think about the problem.
That’s why I don’t want you to worry about every individual mistake.
Instead, look for the ones your student isn’t catching.
Those are the ones worth your attention.
The goal is eventually for your student to do what I do:
Get an answer.
Look at it.
And think:
“Wait…that doesn’t look right.”
Then go back and figure out why.
That’s not being perfect.
That’s being a mathematician.
One simple thing to try
The next time your student gets a problem wrong, don’t immediately tell them the answer.
Try saying:
“Show me what you were thinking.”
You may be surprised by how much you learn from their answer.
And you may be even more surprised when they find the mistake themselves.
That’s the goal.
Not a student who never makes mistakes.
A student who learns how to catch them, understand them, and correct them.
And that is a skill that will serve them far beyond math.
