What is the single most important thing that can help students who are often confused about mathematics to get better control of it?
Being organized in working problems is really important. Documenting your progress through the problem in clear universally accepted mathematical notation in as many individual steps as possible helps you reduce your uncertainty to smaller steps where you can rely on basic rules of algebra or calculus or the relevant area of mathematics that you are doing. Combining several steps in a mental calculation and then just writing down the result will often hide a mental error that will leave no trace in your work and be difficult to track down later. Identify an expression you write down by putting an equal sign to its left and the symbol which explains what it is on the left hand side.
