New answers tagged examples
3
Whether you mention the common mistake or not, it is likely to be made by some student. I think the best approach is to mention this mistake but you need to be very clear about why it is wrong, and show the thought process that arrives you at the correct answer. Many educators concern about the consequences of introducing the idea of a wrong answer because ...
8
I constantly present wrong answers, identified as such, in my class. My strategy for dealing with exactly the issue you present is that wrong statements, and only (intentionally) wrong statements, appear in red. I hope that this is a convenient and reliable visual cue. Students hate it, though.
One approach that has given me reasonable success, and that ...
4
You could perhaps use examples and non-examples.
This is less about explicitly telling students what the common mistakes are, but more about where the theorem or result applies and where it doesn't.
At high school, this might be showing students what is meant by angles in the same segment and what is not meant by angles in the same segment, for example.
In ...
13
Here's another approach when there is a common pitfall that you wish the students to avoid. After teaching the correct reasoning: present the error to the class and ask a student to identify, explain, and correct the mistake. Being able to correct others' mistakes shows a high-level of understanding, and students who make that same mistake might be able to ...
29
This is a 100% subjective opinion, but it is based on teaching in various venues for close to 20 years (although none of that teaching was pure math). Also, my college calculus courses are close to 30 years behind me, so please excuse me if my examples aren't directly related.
IMHO, one of the biggest mistakes in teaching is failure to compare and contrast ...
0
This question is just old wine in new bottles. The situation referred to is true across the board in cognition. The mechanics of the situation is that mls always trumps gls, ‘mls’ standing for the ‘momentary life situation’, and ‘gls’ standing for the ‘general life situation’, these terms having been introduced by Kurt Lewin, the founder of Social Psychology....
9
I don't think you have anything to be afraid of here, unless you spend all of your time playing what-if games with common pitfalls, or peppering the board with false statements and not clarifying them as such. As a class conversation about mistakes-to-avoid or a way to encourage students to always check their answers, I think bringing these up can be really ...
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