I’ve been visiting recently with colleagues here at Utah State University discussing the initiation of a new project to help improve math education here in the state. If you were given an infinite supply of money, time, and personnel, what would you do?
If you were given a small amount of resources, what would you do?
Who should be targeted? Those that are flunking out, the average student, the high achiever? What age level?
A number of opinions have been expressed:
- Technology can help, but in itself it is not the solution.
- Integrated curriculum can help motivate students, but in itself it is not the answer.
- Highly structured, programmed instruction is needed to help students gain basic skills, but if it is used in isolation it results in students loosing interest and not learning higher order skills. It should be used in conjunction with other exploratory and discovery methods.
- We need to start early with students. If we wait until middle school or high school it is probably too late. A contrasting opinion is that we can in fact help change the culture of middle school and high school classrooms, which results in improved student perspectives of mathematics (though possibly not improved math scores).
- A professor of secondary ed stated that he thought what made the biggest difference (in student learning and attitude?) is the interaction pattern used by teachers. He deplores the IRE (teacher initiates a question, student responds, and teacher evaluates the students response). He believes that this results in students feeling like everything they say will be evaluated, and so they stop saying anything.
- We need to support individualized instruction (a la Mastery Learning). Teach each student where they are at, and don’t move on until they learn it.
- In order to support individualized instruction, a detailed model of what each student knows should be developed and follow students through their educational career. This model should be used by teachers to help individualize instruction.
To me, the challenge seems to be to develop a model, materials, and support system that teachers will buy into, that allows them to individualize instruction. Does anyone out there have examples of how this has successfully been accomplished? I am also interested to hear opinions on the points I have listed.
Posted on September 10th, 2003 by joel
Filed under: interactive online math, math education
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