Posts

Why Students Struggle With Math And How To Overcome It

Image
Why Students Struggle With Math And How To Overcome It As interesting as the subject is, over the years, math has got a bad reputation among the younger crowd. In fact, for many students, practising math is not something that comes intuitively or automatically, it takes plenty of effort. Survey reports even suggest that 37% of the students aged between 13-17 found math to be the most difficult subject. (Source) This goes without saying that these overwhelming numbers of students struggling with math are not simply because of a short attention span. From learning difficulties, anxiety to lacking basic concepts, there are many reasons why students are not drawn to math as a subject. Before we jump into the methods to help students overcome math problems, let us first discuss the common causes due to which students struggle to learn math: 1. Basic Concepts Are Not Clear The most common problem while learning math is that students lack an understanding of the basic concepts. Th

What is Mathematical Thinking and why is it important?

What is Mathematical Thinking Mathematical thinking is a lot more than just being able to do arithmetic or solve algebra problems. It is a whole way of looking at things, stripping them down to their essentials, whether it’s numerical, structural or logical and then analyzing the underlying patterns. Math is about patterns. When we are teaching a mathematical method, we are showing something that happens all the time, something that happens in general. Getting students to see these underlying structures, whether it’s in a math problem, in society, or in nature, is one of the reasons that studying mathematics is so worthwhile. It transforms math from drudgery to artistry. Identified four fundamental processes, in two pairs, and showed how thinking mathematically very often proceeds by alternating between them: Specializing – trying special cases, looking at examples Generalizing - looking for patterns and relationships Conjecturing – predicting relationships and results C