One of the eternal quandaries in education is how to assess the amount of knowledge transferred during the teaching process. It is more common today for a timed written test to be a large component of assessment but perhaps the oldest form is the oral examination (or viva voce) (Huxham, Campbell, & Westward, 2012). Oral examinations still occur for the doctoral thesis, the legal moot court and many postgraduate medical programmes (Joughin 2007). In mathematics service units at tertiary level, students anticipate that the assessment may consist of written tests and/or assignments, online quizzes, and a final examination. In my experience as an educator, I have observed students spend many hours wondering and predicting their final grade. They peruse previous tests/examinations to ascertain their choice of questions to answer, the content of their allowable test/examination notes and use a myriad of mathematical ideas to predict their final grade. Students from a variety of disciplines are required to have a degree of mathematical thinking and knowledge which they will later apply in their chosen field. Since most mathematics service units are positioned in the first year, the relevance to their degree course is not readily appreciated. Students with non-mathematical majors require a broad knowledge rather than deep theoretical comprehension of mathematics. The written solution can hide the true intention of the author as incorrect reasoning or misconception can be masked by a correct answer (Mitchell & Horne, 2011). The spoken word leaves room for these to be clarified. This exploratory paper will examine the proposal of oral presentations in tutorials as part of the assessment in mathematics service units.
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...mathematics: an alternative assessment technique, Primus: Problems, Resources and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies, 16(3), 243-256.
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Abhi is a stage 3 student from Year 6, who recently attempted his selective school test. Having a conversation with his parents helped me to know that Abhi enjoys doing maths and is working at appropriate stage level. Abhi states that his most interesting topics in maths are place value, angles and geometry (I-04), as they are easy to understand (I-05). Whereas, he hates fractions and decimals (I-06) as he found them to be very confusing (I-07).
Restivo, Sal, Jean Paul Van Bendegen, and Roland Fischer. Math Works: Philosophical and Social Studies of Mathematics and Mathematics Education. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.
The curriculum implies that teachers will teach students the skills they need for the future. Valley View’s High School math department announces, “Students will learn how to use mathematics to analyze and respond to real-world issues and challenges, as they will be expected to do college and the workplace.” Also, the new integrates math class allows students to distinguish the relationship between algebra and geometry. Although students are not being instructed a mathematical issue in depth, they are rapidly going through all the different topics in an integrated math class. Nowadays, students are too worried to pass the course to acquire a problem-solving mind. Paul Lockhart proclaims the entire problem of high school students saying, “I do not see how it's doing society any good to have its members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams and dear memories of hating them.” A mathematics class should not be intended to make a student weep from complicated equations, but it should encourage them to seek the numbers surrounding
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As a teacher it will always be my responsibility to keep up to date on new research done on learning theories. That way I am able to provide a fun and exciting learning environment for my students. After learning about Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences I now realize how important it is to make sure I work hard to include every child into my curriculum. Gardner’s theory is that everyone is able to recognize a student that does scores great on an exam is smart, that does not mean that a student that falls short of doing good on the same test is not as brilliant as the other student. Howard Gardner’s, theory opposes traditional methods that view intelligences as unitary, and perceives intelligence to contain eight domains. Gardner believes there is several different intelligences that each person embodies in certain magnitudes. Having more of a particular intelligence than another will change has each person retain information. As a child growing up in public elementary schools, I was taught from a traditional methods. These methods focused mainly on verbal and mathematical skills. If a student is anyone of the other six proposed intelligences, he or she would most likely do unsatisfactorily in school. Howard Gardner’s eight intelligences are: body/ kinesthetic, naturalist, visual/ spatial, musical/ rhythmic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, verbal/ linguistic, and logical/ mathematical.
The brain is a very powerful organ, no doubt. It tells your body how to react and what to do. But what happens when you listen to music? How does your brain react? Let’s take a look.
Education and intelligence are two subjects, when combined, creates many issues, much controversy, which motivates research. Over the past century, the dynamics of the issues concerning intelligence, intelligence testing and education have changed drastically. The relationship between intelligence theory, testing and education has proceeded to become a highly sophisticated multidimensional approach emphasizing the explanation of differences in cognitive functioning and treatment of learning disabilities. The technical, more advanced multidimensional approach to intelligence provides school psychologists, as well as teachers, with useful information necessary for a more optimistic future in education. The transformation of theory, testing and educational practice and policy is a product of an outdated conceptualization of intelligence. Old conceptualizations were limited to a unidimensional approach, focusing on predictions of academic success, paying no attention to explanation or treatment. This view challenges the traditional methods of teaching and assessing students because, traditionally, all students are taught and assessed the same way.
Howard Gardner is the “John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero” (Gardner bio, Multiple Intelligences and Education, MI Theory, and Project Zero). As director of Project Zero, it provided and environment that Gardner could begin the exploration of human cognition (Multiple Intelligences and Education). Project Zero colleagues have been designing assessment and the use of multiple intelligences (MI) to realize more personalized curriculum, instruction, and teaching methods; and the quality of crossing traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought in education (Gardner bio). MI theories offer tools to educators that will allow more people to master learning in an effective way and to help people “achieve their potential at the workplace, in occupations, and in the service of the wider world” (Gardner papers).
Rittle-Johnson, B., & Alibali, M. W. (1999). Conceptual and procedural knowledge of mathematics: Does one lead to the other? Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(1), 175-189.
In this paper, I will give a brief overview of Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI). I will also discuss the merits and critiques of the theory in the field of cognitive development. I will also discuss the applicability of Gardner’s theory to my personal development. The final section will cover the application of the theory in a counselling framework. This will be supported by discussing theoretical orientations that would best adopt application of Gardner’s theory.
The theory advanced by Howard Gardner referred to as Multiple Intelligences, suggests that there are varying degrees of intelligence that an individual possess. Gardner proposed that there are seven forms of intelligence: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, body-kinaesthetic, intrapersonal and interpersonal. This theory proposes that teaching and learning should be based on an individual’s different and unique form of intelligence, (Armstrong, 2009). The traditional teaching method encompasses and focuses on verbal linguistic and mathematical logical intelligence. However, the theory by Gardner suggests that there are five other forms of
As a secondary subject, society often views mathematics a critical subject for students to learn in order to be successful. Often times, mathematics serves as a gatekeeper for higher learning and certain specific careers. Since the times of Plato, “mathematics was virtually the first thing everyone has to learn…common to all arts, science, and forms of thought” (Stinson, 2004). Plato argued that all students should learn arithmetic; the advanced mathematics was reserved for those that would serve as the “philosopher guardians” of the city (Stinson, 2004). By the 1900s in the United States, mathematics found itself as a cornerstone of curriculum for students. National reports throughout the 20th Century solidified the importance of mathematics in the success of our nation and its students (Stinson, 2004). As a mathematics teacher, my role to educate all students in mathematics is an important one. My personal philosophy of mathematics education – including the optimal learning environment and best practices teaching strategies – motivates my teaching strategies in my personal classroom.
Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard, introduced his theory of multiple intelligences in 1983. Multiple intelligence’s is a theory about the brain that says human beings are born with single intelligence that cannot be changed, and is measurable by a psychologist. Gardner believes that there are eight different intelligences in humans. The eight are verbal linguistic, visual spatial, bodily kinesthetic, mathematical logic, musical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and naturalist. Understanding these intelligence’s will help us to design our classroom and curriculum in a way that will appeal to all of our students. We might also be able to curve discipline problems by reaching a student in a different way. One that will make more sense to them and more enjoyable. We can include all of the intelligences in lessons to accommodate all of the students’ different learning styles at once. By reaching each students intelligence we can assume that a student will perform better which, could mean students retaining more important information. A students learning style can also help lead them into a more appropriate career direction. As a teacher you can also learn your own personal learning style or intelligence to help improve the way you learn and teach.
When I graduated from high school, forty years ago, I had no idea that mathematics would play such a large role in my future. Like most people learning mathematics, I continue to learn until it became too hard, which made me lose interest. Failure or near failure is one way to put a stop to learning a subject, and leave a lasting impression not worth repeating. Mathematics courses, being compulsory, are designed to cover topics. One by one, the topics need not be important or of immediate use, but altogether or cumulatively, the topics provide or point to a skill, a mastery of mathematics.
A somewhat underused strategy for teaching mathematics is that of guided discovery. With this strategy, the student arrives at an understanding of a new mathematical concept on his or her own. An activity is given in which "students sequentially uncover layers of mathematical information one step at a time and learn new mathematics" (Gerver & Sgroi, 2003). This way, instead of simply being told the procedure for solving a problem, the student can develop the steps mainly on his own with only a little guidance from the teacher.