Improvement in Math Skills Through Poetry By: Malyssa Latta

Does writing poetry help improve math skills? I chose this question because it can help not only me but other people. Some people have trouble learning math so poetry can help make it easier to understand and more fun. Poetry could also help people learn not only math but other subjects as well. It would also benefit children a lot. Children learn using songs and poems like the “ABCs” song and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Also, starting at a young age can motivate them to integrate poetry into learning and studying later on in life.

I have written some poetry in the last few years, but have not done much poetry lately. I never went into writing poetry using poetry forms. I would just write poetry that rhymed which is technically a poetry form called free verse. Free verse is an irregular form of poetry where the content is free of traditional rules, so I don't count it as a poetry form because it doesn't have set rules. I was willing to try different poetry forms. My professor told me that she had heard about poetry helping math skills, so I decided to test it out for my research project. I also thought doing poetry again would be fun.

To research and gather my data, I did a 30 day immersion project. On my first day of immersion which was February 5 th, 2013, I took a SAT math quiz and got a score of 6 out of 10. I never went back to the quiz site so I could not look at the questions and study. Then I wrote poetry for the next 28 days. The first 6 days I used different poetry forms. The last 22 days I did free verse poetry. On March 5 th which was my last day, I retook the quiz and compared the two scores. I improved only slightly. I got 7 out of 10 questions correct.

My findings showed that poetry does in fact help improve math skills. I improved by 10% on the test I took with writing poetry once a day for 30 days. I believe this time frame might have been too short for a more definite result. It probably would've been better with a longer time frame. I also believe that the best way to test this research for the best result would be to test it on children. Teach children math using poetry and see if there is improvement. Children have much more to learn in math than a college student, so it would be easier to test using a simpler test than a SAT test.