Sunday, 10 August 2008

Simple Trick To Encourage Maths Practice

In maths teaching, worksheets are a necessary tools to enable students practice and apply their newly found knowledge. It serves to reflect the underlying level of understanding to both the teachers and learners. It shows whether the teaching is effective and whether the topics taught has been learned correctly.

In maths, symbols, variables, equations and expressions are aplenty. They tells many "stories". It is through these that ideas get across.

So what happens when they are not properly written?

What happens when even maths questions are poorly written?

Will the students be motivated to practice on them?

For good maths teaching, questions on the worksheets can preferably be written with a font size suitable for the topics. If there are many superscripts involved, it will be good to have bigger font size.

Example is Indices, where the placement of the "power" number is at a higher level. If this "power" number is too small, what happen when the students have to strain their eyes to encode this number?

Compare 2x with 2x. Which has a better chance to motivate or at least make maths practice pleasant?

If original maths worksheets is already small in font size, we can make a zoom-up copy of it and hand to the students. The students will be delighted!

This is an indirect way of clearing obstacles to the learning journey. A small and simple step mentioned above can set a positive direction to anyone learning maths.

Focus on the basic essential of teaching, and all else can start with a happy footing.

:-)
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