Dr. Paul Nolting's Academic Success Press Blog: A Publication Dedicated to Math Success |
Dr. Paul Nolting's Academic Success Press Blog: A Publication Dedicated to Math Success |
Hello readers! Today we present a brief interview with Dr. Rochelle Beatty. Beatty, who has worked for years both in the academic and publishing worlds, is currently teaching a few math courses at a community college in Kansas. Because we have spoken with so many administrators and researchers in recent weeks, we thought we'd mix things up a bit and try to capture the teachers' perspective on study skills and math redesigns. Enjoy! ASP Blog: I want to start by asking you about the importance of math-specific study skills, specifically for first-year students or students in developmental mathematics. How important is it that students learn and use these skills in their first college-level math courses?
Beatty: Very important. If students come into college unprepared, then they need not only instruction on the content of a class, but also on how to study—because this is usually one of the main reasons they are unprepared: they've just never had a grasp on study skills. This includes simple things like knowing how to take notes or understanding the importance of being in class. The easiest thing you can do to ensure a good grade is to show up. It seems like sometimes this is the biggest challenge with our developmental math students—their lives just keep getting in the way. All of this falls under study strategies: knowing how to manage your time, knowing how to prioritize school so that your studies are always at the forefront of your life. I really think that—with a lot of redesign models moving to computer-based modes of instruction—study skills become even a bigger part of the picture. Students need to be able to archive their work on paper, so that they can go back and reflect upon what they’ve done and not only on what they’ve seen. ASP Blog: On that topic, what specific skills do online or emporium model students need? Beatty: Again, time management is particularly important in this setting. Students are not going to make it through a course if they think that their computer lab time is the only time they need to be engaged with class content. It still holds that students need to study three hours outside of class for every one hour in class. In fact, I just told my students yesterday: “Don’t just think that those three hours are going to happen on their own. You have to set a schedule, and it probably isn’t a good idea to devote these three hours to the night before class in a single chunk, because your mind is easily fatigued. So you have to make sure you have one hour somewhere during the day to go back and study your math and keep progressing on it.” The other thing I tell students is that the Internet they find on campus might be some of the best Internet around in terms of speed and having instructional and technical support. So they should always make sure they schedule at least one additional hour of computer time between classes somewhere on campus. ASP Blog: In terms of computer skills: one would assume that modern students would have grown up with computers and therefore have a basic grasp on how to use them. But this isn’t always the case, correct? Beatty: Sadly, although our students are extremely connected to their gadgets—and have anxiety when they are without these gadgets—this does not mean that knowing how to use those things for everyday life is equivalent to knowing how to use those devices for educational or instructional usage. You really do need to know where your students are [in this regard] and make sure you can provide them keyboarding skills and other traditional computer skills they might not have. Not only do you need to teach math, but you need to teach computer proficiency. Sometimes these skills are not always intuitive—even with something simple like printing documents. There are so many other things that come into play also. With their phones and gadgets students aren’t having to save files or take screenshots. If you are teaching an online or emporium model course, you really need to be hands on in the classroom. ASP Blog: How important is it that teachers read up on new pedagogy—new ideas, new discourse, being published in academic journals? Beatty: I think it is huge. For instance, I think that if teachers don’t understand the difference between how a developmental math student processes information versus how a college-level student processes information, they can’t properly serve either group. The same is true if you don’t understand adult students and their learning preferences versus traditional students and their learning preferences. There is a lot of theory out there that I think instructors should not only be aware of, but also incorporate into practice. ASP Blog: You wrote your dissertation on cognitive development and vocabulary. Do you use this research in your classroom? Beatty: Yes. Specifically vocabulary. In mathematics, understanding what certain words mean and understanding how one set of directions differs from another set of directions can really be a make it or break it situation for students. Students must make vocabulary a priority, which once again goes back to study skills. Cognitive development is also important. Students have to grow from a perspective that math is dualistic—right/wrong, black/white, true/false—to a perspective that math is multiplistic—that there is not just one way to solve a problem, one way to pose an answer. Students should not erase their work just because their path is different from one of their classmate's. Students need to know how to let that point of confusion be an easy thing to accept while one waits for the inevitable “Aha!" moment—when they realize, "we both got the same answer, we just went about it differently.” I think this is another place where developmental students often struggle—often because past high school instructors insisted that work only be completed by using a very uniform approach, and now their college instructor uses an entirely different method. In the classroom, we need to not only focus on the content, but also make sure that our students embrace this notion that math doesn’t always have to start the same way—that you have to look at a problem and decide between all of the different methods you have at your disposal.
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9/25/2017 07:22:26 pm
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AuthorDr. Nolting is a national expert in assessing math learning problems, developing effective student learning strategies, assessing institutional variables that affect math success and math study skills. He is also an expert in helping students with disabilities and Wounded Warriors become successful in math. He now assists colleges and universities in redesigning their math courses to meet new curriculum requirements. He is the author of two math study skills texts: Winning at Math and My Math Success Plan. Blog HighlightsAmerican Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges presenter, Senior Lecturer-Modular Reader Contributions
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