After some assessment it is clear to me that we need to refocus how we are teaching these students. They have excellent procedural knowledge, and the strategies my master teacher has implemented do a fantastic job of having the students master these procedures. It is clear to me, however, that they have no idea how to apply these procedures outside of the box. For example, if you phrase a question in an unfamiliar way they are lost. This past months we have focused on metric conversions and scientific notation. While students know what scientific notation and metric conversions are, it appears that they are unable to apply the concepts. For example, as a warm up the students were asked, "What is 4.2x10^3 km in meters?" While any student in the class could convert the number from scientific notation to 4200, and they could convert km to m, they were totally lost when asked to do both at the same time. They had knowledge of the procedures but an inability to use their knowledge to solve a multistep problem combining two concepts. The problems the students are exposed to in their worksheets present these two concepts as isolated entities, causing the students to compartmentalize the procedures rather than thinking about them in a larger context.
This is why we need to refocus our teaching. Having tricks for remembering procedures is all well and good, but if students don't understand the concept behind the procedure it loses its value.
This is why we need to refocus our teaching. Having tricks for remembering procedures is all well and good, but if students don't understand the concept behind the procedure it loses its value.