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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: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:57PM
I had and noticed the same problem in college. Highschool we had some great teachers and I did pretty well, but by college you end up with "teaching" being synonymous with some foreign grad student mumbling into a chalkboard for an hour. I took basic calc in highschool, and I know what derivatives and integrals are and could probably manage to work my way through the simpler ones even today. Beyond that...shit, I don't even know the names of the concepts I was supposed to be learning in my second and third semester calc classes. The "class" was mostly formulas being written on a board with no explanation, and the book went no further than "If the problem looks like this, plug into this formula to get an answer"
In highschool calc, a friend and I would spend our free time trying to work out new formulas. For example, they taught us how to use an integral to calculate the volume of a solid formed by rotating a curve around the axis, and we spent months trying to work out a formula for rotating any curve around any other arbitrary curve. Including arguments about what exactly rotation even means when the axis of rotation is not a straight line. At one point during our highscool prom we both briefly abandoned our girlfriends to talk about that problem. And in one year I went from that level of obsession to complete disengagement. Because when you can visualize what the problem you're solving actually means, it naturally raises additional questions and challenges. But when all you have is a formula to memorize, it doesn't really lead anywhere.