Group items tagged

“Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. Mathematically proficient students start by explaining to themselves the meaning of a problem and looking for entry points to its solution.”

“Reason abstractly and quantitatively. Mathematically proficient students make sense of quantities and their relationships in problem situations.”

“Use appropriate tools strategically. Mathematically proficient students consider the available tools when solving a mathematical problem.”

Einstein's students were developing too many shortcuts and not enough understanding.

While 71 percent of its fourth graders meet state math goals, only 17 percent of its 11th graders do.

At Einstein, the problem became clear when teachers gave fifth graders a simple test. They told them to put down their pencils and estimate answers to simple questions, different ones than they were used to.

I used the following with a group of fifth graders and the students have been moving further toward meaningful dialogue and conceptual thinking.

The SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium has released its content specifications in math.

• #1: Students can explain and apply mathematical concepts and carry out mathematical procedures with precision and fluency. • #2: Students can frame and solve a range of complex problems in pure and applied mathematics. • #3: Students can clearly and precisely construct viable arguments to support their own reasoning and to critique the reasoning of others. • #4: Students can analyze complex, real-world scenarios and can use mathematical models to interpret and solve problems.

a new draft will be issued for comment on Sept. 19. That's the day that comment on the first-round math content specifications is due as well.

The underlying principle is simple: Students learn math by doing math, not by listening to someone talk about doing math. Interactive computer software, personalized on-demand assistance, and mandatory student participation are the key elements of success.

What is critical is the pedagogy: eliminating lecture and using interactive computer software combined with personalized, on-demand assistance.

Students spend the bulk of their course time doing math problems rather than listening to someone talk about doing them.

The four most common strategies were counting fingers, verbal counting, retrieval (quickly stating an answer and describing they “just remembered”), and decomposition (describing that they solved the problem by decomposing one addend and successively adding these smaller sets to the other addend; e.g., 17+8 = 17+3+5).

The failings of a rote-memorization system are well-known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning.

According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake.

Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.

This new teaching and learning style, often called “flipped” or “inverted” learning, makes the students the focus of the class, not the teacher, by having students watch a lecture at home and then apply the lesson with the teacher in the classroom.

they should be able to leave my class knowing how to question, research, and test scientific claims regardless of what they choose to do afterwards

At the same time, I also feel that those students who do excel in STEM fields need to have classes that push them and challenge them with real-world problems, and not just memorized facts from a textbook.”

A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.

The iPads cost $750 apiece, and they are to be used in class and at home during the school year to replace textbooks, allow students to correspond with teachers and turn in papers and homework assignments, and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios.

“IPads are marvelous tools to engage kids, but then the novelty wears off and you get into hard-core issues of teaching and learning.”

These are the addition problems and method we all learned in school.

This app has you adding from left to right instead of starting in the ones place, which goes against everything I learned.

This one is unusual, dividing up some of the numbers into their parts (whole ones, whole tens, etc.), and subtracting the parts.

In a small grove at the entrance to the school, first graders acquire the rudiments of addition and subtraction by collecting pine cones and stones and solving problems contained in notes attached to trees. Another group plays a memory game, using cards with arithmetic exercises whose solutions are found on a game board painted on the playground. The second grade is engaged in a treasure hunt, with arithmetic exercises that send children scurrying from one location to another. The third graders are at the seashore, researching the sand 0f(and not one of them has run into the water 0f). An arithmetic class for the fourth grade is underway in the gym: Small groups of children are scattered charmingly across the floor, playing games with boxes. Here the major attraction is the group standing in a line opposite the teacher, who holds up signs showing numbers that are the result of multiplication. The children’s task is to say which two numbers were multiplied to produce this result. Those who give the right answer also get to shoot a basketball.

Ten Marks is one that focuses on math. A colleague of mine really liked it, although I have not registered my own students before. Another for both ELA & math assessments is Easy CBM.

Sokikom.com has a free component for number sense- fractions/decimals/prevents – that is very well developed, adaptive, and includes video tutorials. My students love it! They also have several components that one could pay to add on.

One site that I’ve found to be quite beneficial is ThatQuiz.org. Toying around has found quite a variety of items to introduce and review with the students, and it catalogs quite a bit of data, making it easy to pinpoint individual problems, as well as class issues with specific math concepts.