In recent years brain researchers have found that the students who are most successful with number
problems are those who are using different brain pathways – one that is numerical and symbolic and
the other that involves more intuitive and spatial reasoning (Park & Brannon, 2013). At the end of this
paper we give many activities that encourage visual understanding of number facts, to enable important
brain connections. Additionally brain researchers have studied students learning math facts in two ways
– through strategies or memorization. They found that the two approaches (strategies or memorization)
involve two distinct pathways in the brain and that both pathways are perfectly good for life long use. Importantly
the study also found that those who learned through strategies achieved ‘superior performance’
over those who memorized, they solved problems at the same speed, and showed better transfer to new
problems. The brain researchers concluded that automaticity should be reached through understanding
of numerical relations, achieved through thinking about number strategies (Delazer et al, 2005).