Award-Winning Private ISEE Tutoring in Arcadia, CA

We dove straight into quantitative reasoning/ mathematics practice. The student did get an opportunity to write me back in our journal. We worked through additional word problems together. The biggest thing I had to emphasize throughout was the importance of reading and re-reading the problems and putting what she is thinking in response to the statement and question at hand in writing. While she often successfully solves problems out loud and in her head on the way to getting to the final solution, she doesn't yet see the significance of writing scratch work, formulas, equations, etc. down as a sort of checks and balances. There was one problem in particular where she got to see the benefit of reading through what she'd just written firsthand (as she caught a small mistake in her work as a result). After this, our sole focus was on quantitative comparisons. By the end she was much clearer on how to look at or compare columns A and B and at viewing the problems at multi -step (retaining the focus on solving the problem associated with Column A versus Column B before turning to the four answer choices shared by all quantitative comparison problems). In the beginning the fact that sometimes questions in the section were implied comparisons between columns (as opposed to a clear cut question) made for a challenging time for the student, but as we pushed through the section, she began to see the pattern in inherent in this math section and approached later problems with much greater ease.

The student wrote his essay in 20 minutes. I will have him work on going slowly and writing with more detail. He did very well on his vocab quiz. He still needs practice on sentence completion, but he understands key strategies. He is advancing in his ability to use algebra skills to solve word problems.

In this session, the student and I continued our work on math, focusing mainly on fractions, decimals, and percents.