Course:MATH TAAP/2012/discussion
< Course:MATH TAAP | 2012
Discussion notes from meetings
September 27th - Conclusion
- As teachers we do experience similar changes that our students since we are learning how to teach
- Scrapbook : good place to gather all the ideas we have for teaching
- p. 218 (bottom of the page) quote about being entertaining or not : is it supported by research? is there reference about that? how could we design an experiment to measure that? what is/should be the definition of entertaining?
- Does our style of presenting changes between the first-year course and seminar/formal presentation?
- Are jokes good to help remember content? is good to use them in class?
September 24th - Online activities -- Social Identity & Course Climate
Ideas for online activities :
- Java applets, flash activity
- Pencast
- Wikis, Google+, skype, ...
- Combination of these (e.g. check Peter Novig's TED talk for ideas)
Social Identity & Course Climate
- Even people who want to be impartial have biases ! (for example unconsciously marking differently male and female students)
- What are the elements that make us help people that are just under a passing grade?
- We may have biases against people who never come to office hours, or didn't try to get help, especially if they were told to do so.
- Inform students about stereotypes can help them overcome it, see this research paper
September 17th - Online activities -- Practice & Feedback
Ideas for online activities :
- Online chatroom, answer questions on a forum, online lessons, online assignments, youtube videos, and many more (come up with whatever you want)...
About Practice & Feedback
- importance of working on the integration steps
- the difference between integration and application seem very thin, it would be good to precise it
September 12th - Motivation Factors
- Many students have only external motivation, they want to pass the course (because it is a requirement) and nothing else
- What could we do about it? how could we make students more interested in the material itself?
- Present something mind blowing : something that everyone takes from granted and explain why it really works
- Ask students about their interests and incorporate that in examples and homework : give them some choice so that they own the course. Problem : do we do if there are many different interests ?
- Create a system in which students help/motivate each other; create supportive environment
- Make the content more concrete for students (one problem is that as instructors, we usually don't control the syllabus)
- It is important for the students to use logic in many different contexts
- what kind of experiment could we set up to test this idea?
September 10th - Knowledge organization
- students have in general very fragmented knowledge
- how could we help with that?
- present a concept map/diagram to explain the connections : probably ask students to create it themselves is more helpful
- do it throughout the term vs at the end as a summary task
- Questions about concept maps : time consuming? quality? students' resistance?
September 7th - Main misconceptions in first year calculus
- one bad teacher?
- Algebra skills (simplifying, exponents, distributive)
- They think they're going to pass (expectations)
- Logic (A implies B means B implies A)
- Common sense (or lack therof)
- attitude to mathematics
- applications to their life