Skip to main content

Home/ UWCSEA Math/ Group items tagged research

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Sean McHugh

JUMP Math, a teaching method that's proving there's no such thing as a bad math student... - 0 views

qz.com/...ch-thing-as-a-bad-math-student

math teaching method

shared by Sean McHugh on 17 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Mighton has identified two major problems in how we teach math. First, we overload kids’ brains, moving too quickly from the concrete to the abstract. That puts too much stress on working memory. Second, we divide classes by ability, or “stream”, creating hierarchies which disable the weakest learners while not benefitting the top ones.
  • But too many children don’t have the building blocks from which to discover the answers. They get frustrated, and then fixed in the belief that they are not “math people.”
  • When I pause, even for a second, Mighton apologizes and says he clearly hasn’t explained it well, and takes another stab at it a different way.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • But many teachers struggle with their own math anxiety, and research shows that they then pass on this anxiety to their students. (That happens with parents too, unfortunately.)
  • small, incremental steps which made the math accessible to all students and allowed some of them to experience success in math for the first time. “Because they can master the increments, they are getting the checks and building the mindset that their efforts can amount to something. That experience motivates them to continue,” she said. By continuing, they practice more math, get more skills, and become the math people they thought they couldn’t be.
  • it starts small and progresses in very small steps to a very sophisticated level in a relatively short period of time
  • collective effervescence,” the joy of knowing they can do it, rather than the joy of just getting a high mark
  • JUMP is a nonprofit, and all its materials are available on its website
  • math has been overhyped as hard, and all that students and teachers need is to have things broken down properly. Many have dubbed these simple steps as “drill and kill”. But he says the steps can be made fun, like puzzles.
Sean McHugh

Ask the Cognitive Scientist - 0 views

www.aft.org/...willingham

Manipulatives research Maths

shared by Sean McHugh on 26 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Perceptually rich manipulatives reduced conceptual errors (children set up the math problem correctly) but increased other types of errors (e.g., calculation errors). Detailed manipulatives draw attention (which helps) but then may direct attention to irrelevant details
  • Helping a child understand the idea of fractions by dividing a circular pizza or pie works well until you encounter a fraction with the denominator 9. Or 10,000
  • students learned the concept more quickly with the familiar symbols, but transfer to different problems was better with the abstract symbols
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Even if students learn a concept with manipulatives and simultaneously learn it with written symbols, the two may remain separate, with students never drawing the connection between them
  • A simple review of key conclusions makes a few things clear. First, we must temper our endorsement of manipulatives in classrooms with some caveats; there are instances where manipulatives will not speed children’s learning, and may even slow it down. Second, the objects themselves should draw attention to whichever feature is meant to convey information, for example, the length of a rod if it is meant as an analogy to number. Third, teachers should provide instruction in the use of the manipulative so that this feature is salient to students, but teachers should not be so controlling that students are merely executing instructions without thinking. In addition, students are more likely to understand the concept the manipulative is meant to convey if that parallel is made explicit to them
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page