Seeking Better Math Assessments
Posted on August 30th, 2010 by Jaimie Schock
Formative assessments can be a great teaching tool to help math instructors ensure their pupils are grasping the lessons. If problems are spotted, adjustments can be made before it’s too late. But, is there a better way to conduct them? Researchers aim to find out.
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Tags: Math, Math teachers, Mathematics, National Science Foundation, Research, Research on Learning
The Illuminations website from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics features a library of 104 online activities that help to make math come alive in the classroom or at home. It also has 560 lessons for preK-12 math educators, information on mathematics teaching standards, and hundreds of links to outside web resources.
The world’s number two professional golfer Phil Mickelson says that some of his success on the links comes from a firm grasp of math and science — he can calculate the odds of sinking a putt from how many feet away the ball is from the hole, for example. Today, the Mickelson ExxonMobile Teacher Academy in Jersey City, N.J. is helping third, fourth, and fifth grade science teachers hone their math and science teaching skills.
Middle School students in McLean, VA, took up a challenge to take a snapshot of the Earth’s curvature without spending more than $200. They pulled it off, using a cooler, camera, weather balloon, GPS cellphone — and all their math ability.
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Six Kentucky districts are testing a new inquiry-based math teaching method called “formative assessment.” The teaching and testing program was designed by experts to emphasize classroom activities that help teachers gauge the learning needs of individual students.
LaMar Queen, a teacher at the Los Angeles Academy, has boosted his eighth-graders’ math grades by his use of rap music — which he writes and performs — to help them learn the rules of algebra.
American girls have closed the mathematics gender gap. That’s the finding of a new study by the Center on Education Policy, which has been tracking gender differences among U.S. students in math and reading since 2002. While girls have traditionally trailed boys when it comes to math skills, particularly at the elementary school level, the study finds that boys and girls are now roughly equally proficient at math at all three levels: elementary, middle school and high school.
Elementary school girls start to fear mathematics at an early age. But, is math anxiety contagious? It could be. In fact, it’s possible that young girls pick up their unease with numbers from female teachers who are anxious about their own math skills, a new University of Chicago study found.
