The advantages of instrumental understanding Skemp lists in
this article can be viewed as study strategies for students who want to have easier
grades and see apparent progress. This type of learning could help students who
have had serious problems with mathematics and just need the grades to pass a
course. Although my teaching experience is very limited, I have witnessed quite
a few students who say they hate mathematics, and some of those students even think
that they would not need mathematics in the real world. They might be right in
some way, but if they were taught to learn relationally rather than
instrumentally, their mathematical approaches towards the world might have been
very different. With instrumental mathematics taught, students might think they
understand, but they are not able to apply those concepts they learned to
different situations. Lack of this skill leads to memory work and eventually
boring classes. In boring classes students tend to strive for easy grades, and
the cycle goes on. A different approach to teaching math, such as relational
understanding, would not just enhance the depth of students’ understanding but
also increase their interest in the subject.
EDCP 342A Unit planning Yeni Yoo St. John’s School, Math 8 Ratios, Rates, and Percentages Preplanning questions: (1) Why do we teach this unit to secondary school students? This unit explores the concepts of ratios, rates, and percentages. The unit focuses on some of the most essential mathematical skills that students could apply in their everyday lives. Students will learn to compare ratios, find equivalent ratios, do scale drawings, convert between percents, fractions, and decimals, etc. Such mathematical skills will be strongly needed in students’ future lives and will enable students to evaluate important factors more precisely and make more reasoned decisions. Students will find such mathematical skills interesting and useful as they explore more and more real-world applications where they could connect the mathematical concepts and demonstrate their knowledge through problem solving. (2) A mathematics project conne...
It's interesting that we say a student 'needs' grades to pass a course. Outside of bureaucratic regulations within schools, what kind of 'need' is that? What does it serve anyone to make a lot of kids bored, I wonder? I appreciate your call for more relational understanding!
ReplyDeleteI guess it's essential to teach students why we need to learn Math first rather than just teaching them the content that is in the curriculum. Students must realize why they learn what they learn. Until then, everything they do at school is just what they have to do because they were told to. Relational mathematics can be one of many approaches that teachers can take in order to guide their students in that way.
DeleteI like your comments!
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