What If Your ABCs Were Your 123s? by Leslie Minton

Author:Leslie Minton [Minton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4522-9361-5
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2007-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

What mathematics do you use in your daily life? What are some of the strategies you use most?

DEVELOPMENTAL OR SEQUENTIAL?

Do you think of mathematics as developmental or sequential in nature? Why?

Mathematics is often referred to as sequential, meaning that students must demonstrate mastery of one idea before they move on to the next. But mathematics is really both sequential and developmental. This idea is important in our consideration of vertical and horizontal curriculum decisions.

Due to the developmental nature of mathematics, some students will grasp the big ideas (concepts) and struggle with the skills that underpin the big ideas. The reverse is also true, as some students will retain facts and demonstrate proficiency with subsets of skills and procedures and have a more difficult time making connections to the big ideas. This is why it is important for us as instructors to understand that providing mathematics in familiar contexts, much as we provide reading in familiar contexts, enables students to use their schema and relate to the mathematics to increase their ability to understand. Students may have some areas of relative strength and others of relative weakness, suggesting that exposure to and practice with all kinds of mathematical ideas are essential.

Given the sequential nature of mathematics, it is equally important that students not be given the message that factual knowledge is somehow the gateway to higher-level mathematics. Often students spend a lot of time memorizing isolated facts and have great difficulty doing so because the facts are not explicitly connected to conceptual understanding. It is as inappropriate to hold a child back from rich mathematics due to incomplete mastery of facts as it would be to hold him or her back from rich text due to lack of spelling ability. Readers are exposed to rich text in order to increase their experiences and support the reading process. Mathematicians need to be exposed to rich, robust mathematics to support their learning as well. Wrapping skills within a context and connecting them to concepts allows students to understand at a deeper, more lasting level.

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