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from the no-royal-road-to-understanding-students dept.
Oxford researchers are taking part in an international study to film the teaching of quadratic equations for secondary school pupils. The hope is that lessons will be learned on how to bring out the best in pupils learning about mathematics.
Over the next few months, video cameras will appear in secondary schools across England that have chosen to take part in an international study to observe maths lessons focused on quadratic equations. Researchers from the University of Oxford have joined forces with the Education Development Trust to undertake the study in England, which will involve up to 85 schools from different parts of the country. The research team has to enlist 85 teachers and around 1,200 pupils, so they can analyse video footage of different teaching practices and pupils' responses to assess what works best. Schools in Oxfordshire will be among those approached about taking part in the pilot.
The research project is led by Education Development Trust, working with Dr Jenni Ingram and Professor Pam Sammons from the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. They will analyse how pupils' attitudes toward quadratic equations are linked with their progress and results, and observe how teachers' attitudes and methods affect outcomes.
Dr Ingram said: "We believe this study will improve our understanding of the relationships between a range of teaching practices and various student outcomes, including their enjoyment of mathematics, mathematical knowledge and engagement with learning."
Or you could watch Khan Academy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Dunbal on Tuesday March 28 2017, @07:45PM (6 children)
the students absolutely have to know this stuff
No they don't. Anymore than a high school biology student has to know immunohistochemistry. Right now we have a system that purports to teach the "foundation" skills you mention and the reality is we are graduating students who cannot even add or subtract. There's something seriously wrong here when you claim you want to stick to the current model which is demonstrably broken. How much benefit are students getting from doing trig or quadratic equations when division is a challenge without a calculator and fractions and percentages are some mysterious exotic country? Focus on the REAL basic stuff like arithmetic, and everything else can be glossed over or skipped entirely unless taken as electives.
There's no real time to learn this incorrectly and then relearn it.
Every other science does this. You don't learn PV=nRT in high school. You learn the 3 gas laws separately.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 28 2017, @09:45PM (2 children)
> Focus on the REAL basic stuff like arithmetic, and everything else can be glossed over or skipped entirely unless taken as electives.
Don't come complaining when the industry hires Europeans and Asians, then...
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday March 28 2017, @09:49PM (1 child)
I was under the impression that trend was to hire robots. Seriously, how much math does a burger flipper/retail shop employee need? Those who are motivated to learn will learn. Doesn't matter where they're from.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 28 2017, @10:09PM
> how much math does a burger flipper/retail shop employee need?
Enough to learn how interest and inflation work, so that the math doesn't turn into "how much assistance do they need to survive?"
> Those who are motivated to learn will learn.
Very American of you, and very wrong.
Conversely, those not motivated to learn will turn into your problem, whether you need to pay for them, repair the damage that they cause, or deal with losing your job or retirement after they vote with their guts for lack of ever straining their brain.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @12:39AM
That's really not a fair analogy. I've got my undergrad in the natural sciences and spend my days at work trying to figure out how to get students that are struggling from point A to point B with the least amount of time and effort possible.
2nd degree polynomials are something that shouldn't be glossed over as they are the first exposure that students really have to numerous concepts and they serve as a reinforcing mechanism for all sorts of math. Polynomial multiplication and division, breaking up an equation into smaller pieces, having differing powers of exponents, coefficient management and even just basic masking techniques that get rather complicated later on.
I'm a huge fan of masking out the bullshit. Realistically, there's insufficient time to explicitly teach everything, but glossing over quadratic equations is really not the place to save time. They just show up too often and in too many contexts and have too many math skills to make that an acceptable decision.
What's more, students who don't see and do these things in that unit wind up struggling later on when those practices are put into place in more complicated expressions like exponential and trigonometric functions. Which both have a non-insignificant amount of overlap with quadratic functions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:50AM
> You don't learn PV=nRT in high school
Uh. I got the base laws and then piped up that they could be comingled because of sharing V and didn't that mean that temperature depended on pressure (roughly) and got told to shut up. Then next year we did indeed get the full ideal gas law.
n=1
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:45PM
What are the 3 gas laws? I only know pV = NkT (or pV=nRT, but that version I learned later in university). Honestly.