# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged student-motivation

51

All four of your options lead with "They are told..." Consider asking the student questions instead. At the very least, this shows interest, and they may end up catching their own mistakes as they try to explain to you what they had glossed over in their own heads. When I have the opportunity, I like to challenge my students to explain EVERY step of their ...

41

Imagine you are put in jail. You are forced to paint a painting every day for 10 years. You have no choice in the subject: one month you paint dogs, another month you paint horses, another month you paint lampposts. The prison guard verbally chastises you when your painting is not up to their standard. If you doodle something on your own, outside of the ...

41

I found that my former students (low achieving ninth graders in the U.S.) always responded best when I answered with this: You enjoy watching sports right? Whether it's Football, Basketball, the Olympics, or whatever. Or maybe not sports, but you like watching a rock concert or orchestra. You pay money to see the famous athletes or famous musicians play in ...

40

I'm not completely sure how well this addresses the question, but here is my best response. A few years ago I was teaching a Methods course for preservice secondary math teachers. Over the course of the semester there was a fair amount of griping, not about my course but about the other courses they were required to take, and in particular about their ...

37

When I'm the instructor for the course, I remind them of the time and location of my office hours by writing it on the board at the beginning of every lecture (if you're not the instructor, you can ask the instructor to do this). It sounds like overkill, but in my experience part of the reason students don't attend office hours is because it's just not a ...

37

First of all, I believe this question is quite similar to the question "How to give homework for integration technique?". I avoid the temptation of repeating my answer for that question. Instead, I try to give an answer from a different angle based on a recent experience I had in a numeracy class with adult students. One of the questions I asked was inspired ...

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To expand on my comment, I found that high school kids like watching YouTube videos. (I mean, they don't have to do any work right? Just sit and listen.) These are a few of my go to channels to pull mathematical ideas from. I try to show them short clips that might motivate them to think abuot math in a different way, not only just "plug it into the formulas....

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This is indeed a challenge, especially for adults. Three suggestions, none of which is a panacea. (1) Emphasize a growth mindset. Make it clear to them that learning math is a skill accessible to everyone, with effort. It is not only accessible to those with a mythical "math gene." (2) Compare understanding the abstractions of math and its notations as ...

31

A recent Times article titled Americans Are Bad at Math, but It’s Not Too Late to Fix offered an example - A&W's "Third Pounder hamburger failed to catch on because During focus groups, the company discovered that customers believed they were getting less meat. Because the “3” in ⅓ was smaller than “4” in ¼, “customers believed they were being ...

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You don't say in the question what kind of school this is. It must be a four-year school rather than a community college, but there is no indication of what its admissions standards are like. If this is a state school that's easy to get into, say Cal State Fullerton, and a lot of these students are math education students, then you're extremely lucky that ...

27

A 16 year old once told me that he has no need for mathematics since he wanted to become a lawyer. I told him that he wouldn't make a good lawyer if he jumps to such conclusions without first collecting all available evidence. So what evidence is there? I have a book in front of me: Mathematics, Physics and Finance for the Legal Profession by Ashley ...

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Re-Re-Edit (May 2019): Found in a selection of tweets here but pasted as images to preserve. Credit for the first one goes to @lizardbill and to the rest to @GeneticJen: Re-Edit (Jan 2016): Perhaps this does not quite qualify, but I was rather surprised to spot the following question (#6 in the image below) in a recent airplane Mensa quiz: (Side-note: #2 ...

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Allow me to contribute from the student perspective. I've taken College Algebra classes three times at three different levels and schools due to unusual circumstances. To make things even more interesting, I started out as an English Lit major, and later became a computer programmer. First, you have already realized that confronting the students in an ...

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Imagine you had to look up every word you wanted to use, because you had a poor vocabulary. This would get old, very quickly. The trouble is, many people don't have a genuine need to internalize computational technique as a way to see. As a researcher, I find one of the main values of manual calculation is as error correction for reasoning, and a source of ...

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The closest I came to getting fired for something I said to a student. The student asked "When will I ever use this math in the future?" I responded, "Well, you won't, but the smart kids might." In my opinion, the right answer, even at the high school level, is to ask what they might wish to do in the future. The well rounded education ...

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Here is some text from the paper "Teacher Characteristics and Student Achievement Gains: A Review" (Wayne and Youngs, 2003): Three analyses take advantage of the detailed teacher data in NELS:88 on degrees. The analysis by Goldhaber and Brewer (1997a) illustrates the key finding most clearly. No differences were evident when the authors examined ...

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Talk to math teachers as you would talk to any other professional with whom you share a common interest (the education of your son). Note, I have addressed this to respond to you specifically in some areas, and I have had to make some assumptions in some places. I did this, in part, to try to make this answer more generally helpful (because the title is so ...

25

Most of what you learn in school isn't directly useful. When I was in primary school I was taught the difference between warm and cold-blooded animals. I've never used that information; should I not have been taught it? Another example is that in any English-speaking country you still have to take English courses even after you speak the language fluently....

25

There's probably no silver bullet. But one tool I use is in these situations (e.g., I teach discrete mathematics etc. at a U.S. community college) is to very closely align with a good textbook. In fact, here's my personal note to myself in my checklist for preparing a new course: The most important thing is to TEACH FROM A GOOD BOOK. My motivation here is ...

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There's the Verizon "0.002 cents versus 0.002 dollars" mishap, wherein an unhappy customer calls to complain that he was billed 0.002 $/kB after being told the rate is 0.002 cents/kB. The confusion is perhaps deeper than expected. 20 I really like this answer given by John Green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78PnPd-V-A "School is not about you! School does not exist for your benefit or for the benefit of your parents. Schools exist for the benefit of me. The reason why I pay taxes for schools even though I don’t have a kid in school is that I am better off in a well-... 20 I was unofficially advising a student the other day who told me "I am struggling, but I know more than my friends in the class." This was the excuse she used for not attending meetings of a popular study group. How could she increase her grasp of the subject if her friends couldn't help her? An answer to this question (if not the answer, as I believe there ... 20 Even without explicitly introducing the language of "linear maps", "vectors", and so on, you can still develop matrices as a shorthand for such maps, thought of as exchange rates. Example: Machine A can make 3 sprogs and 2 sprakets a day. Machine B can make 1 sprog and 3 sprakets a day. We summarize this data in a table of values:$$\begin{bmatrix} 3 &... 20 Perhaps: The discovery a year ago of a new tiling of the plane by a convex polygonal tile, found by Mann, McLoud, and Von Derau (the latter of whom was an undergraduate at the time of the discovery): Here is a nice article on the discovery in The Guardian, by Alex Bellos. As Alex says, the problem has been studied for$100$years now, since Reinhardt in ... 20 A lot of students seem to make it through high school and well into college with the idea that school is supposed to be easy, and that having to work hard, or being confused at times, or struggling with some topics means that something has gone wrong. This is nonsense. Struggling with material is a normal part of learning. Indeed, it's an essential part of ... 19 There are a few strategies that are supported by experimental research which I will share here, but they all have to do with stereotype threat. I am sure there are other types of anxiety related to math which would not be helped by these strategies. First, the wikipedia article on stereotype threat is fairly comprehensive. It describes some studies that ... 19 Let me offer a different type of response, a student's answer to a problem. The question offered the height of a building, the equation for distance of a falling object, and asked to calculate the time till a rock dropped off the building would fall to the ground. The student used his calculator and the answer was 900 seconds. I asked if that was right, ... 19 My thinking is that it is just so damn useful for students to be aware of these tricks. The examples/exercise should allow them to develop a sense of when and how it is helpful to simplify an expression in this way, BUT also when it is NOT necessary. Leading up to it by looking at fractions. Should the students write a rational number in the form$3\frac17\$ ...

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Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott It's a story about a 2-dimensional being's encounter with a three-dimensional being. (Well, there's a class(?) allegory at the beginning, but you can skip that.)

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