Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Ch. 10 Content Area Learning
As I was reading this chapter and came across the mathematics section, I have to agree with Mayer that the most basic type of knowledge involves resources or knowledge of basic facts and procedures. The second type of knowledge is general strategies for solving problems. I have taught math in the past and currently tutor fourth graders for their taks test and found that they missed the problem solving problems because they either add instead of subtracting, they didn't add, subtract, divide or multiply correctly, or didn't follow the strategies their teachers have taught them. How many of you have encountered this problem?
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I think one of the reasons that students have difficulty with story problems is because of comprehension. Students need declarative and procedural knowledge in order to be able to translate what they're reading into a mental picture and then apply the solving strategies. After reading the session on the different problem formats, I think that if we teach students keywords that can hint them on whether a story problem is an addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, they would have better results, because they would get the hard part out of the way, deciding the operation.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter is in fourth grade. One of the things I have consistently asked her when she reads the TAKS story problems is: Will you need to add, subtract, multiply, or divide? I know each child is different. For my daughter, she wants to rush and try to figure out the problem. What I would like to encourage her to do is understand the problem. Answer the question, "What are they asking you to do? What operation do you need to use to solve the problem? What pictures do you need to draw? Etc. When my daughter goes through the process of understanding the problem, she gets it right. When she rushes, she gets it wrong. I wish there were a way to slow her down so that she can think through each one of those questions. A process for her to go through "before" she chooses the answer.
ReplyDeleteWhen I taught 5th grade, I would run into this a lot. It helped if I would have them use their strategies, and draw a picture of what was happening. Many times the students would get caught on the terminology, and then totally miss what they needed. As stated earlier, drawing a picture was usually the best way to go for the kids to understand what was going on.
ReplyDeleteI have never taught Math but I often wonder if it’s an issue with language comprehension. Most of my students spoke Spanish before English, and I have noticed that most often they have difficulty comprehending written directions. If I sit down next to them and read along and provide contextual cues, they begin to understand. I can totally see why drawing pictures were beneficial in Marni's class.
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