Timeline for How do you coach students who often make small errors?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 5, 2021 at 19:35 | comment | added | Simon | @Mike Pierce I am old school, and I prefer not to divide the task into many subtasks, to be assessed separately. Of course sometimes my superiors in their great wisdom have insisted that I do so, in order that I may create, and gather data on, such instruments of the Devil as Course Learning Outcomes, Key-Stage Progress Indicators, Attainment Matrices (have I invented that one ?) etc. I believe that the data thus created is very useful to said superiors for their own promotion applications and periodic self-evaluations (which seems strange since it is not work that they did themselves). | |
| Apr 5, 2021 at 14:13 | comment | added | leslie townes | This is good advice for a student who is capable of using a calculator (which doesn't correlate with the original issue as far as I know). For some, issues of syntax, expressing what you actually want to software, etc. are just another layer of complication and introduce further difficulties. But I have struggled with the general issue of messing up calculations, yet am good at using calculators; they "force" me to arrange things in a slightly more organized way. This option would have helped me a lot while I was beginning to learn math. | |
| Apr 4, 2021 at 19:07 | comment | added | Mike Pierce | @Simon ... it depends on what I'm teaching them? Like, if I want to assess their understanding of the arithmetic of exponents, and they say $(x^8)^7 = x^{65}$, this is wrong, but they do know to multiply the numbers. Their error that $8\times 7 = 65$ triggers a false negative in my test. This could've been avoided had they used a calculator. | |
| Apr 4, 2021 at 3:18 | comment | added | Simon | What do you want to assess ? | |
| Apr 4, 2021 at 0:59 | comment | added | Mike Pierce | @Simon it depends on what I want to assess, right? | |
| Apr 4, 2021 at 0:04 | comment | added | Simon | Is the low grade really a skewed assessment of the ability of a student who can't carry out basic arithmetic ? Or is it a timely warning to them not to neglect the basics, while learning more advanced maths ? Would the former interpretation reflect a belief of the instructor's, that the basics don't matter ? Young people are very quick to pick up, and adopt, even the subtlest of such biases. | |
| Apr 3, 2021 at 23:17 | comment | added | Mike Pierce | @RustyCore Eh on some level yeah. But this analogy implies the student makes tons of errors because they're already overly reliant on a calculator. Some students totally are, but I don't know if this is fair for a student who's got some inherent feature of the brain that leads to so many errors. | |
| Apr 3, 2021 at 16:32 | comment | added | SoronelHaetir | Sorry, I must completely disagree with the 'use a calculator' attitude. That simply promotes reliance on the machine with no understanding of whether their final result is correct. Someone who makes the sorts of errors described in the OP seems equally likely to mistype a number or hit plus when they mean minus and without that basic understanding they won't realize the answer they get doesn't make sense. Repetition is, I suspect, the only way to improve (if improvement is possible, I do admit there are some for whom no amount of practice will significantly improve their math ability). | |
| Apr 3, 2021 at 16:18 | comment | added | Rusty Core | This is like suggesting a drug addict to continue using heroin because he is used to it. | |
| Apr 2, 2021 at 14:49 | history | answered | Mike Pierce | CC BY-SA 4.0 |