Maths education
In the present-day classroom children talk to each other a lot. Two items present different, but complementary, analyses of what goes on. In this item very young children's ability to help one another in mathematics is examined.
St. Patrick's College, Campbelltown, NSW, teaches mathematics to the senior classes by bringing all the pupils together for lectures, followed by class-sized tutorials, not all compulsory. John Greene reports how they checked the scheme's success.
There is a lot to be learnt about how to teach a subject from what practitioners do every day. An insight into what delights mathematicians and what could delight our pupils.
In schools we do not study the social effects of gambling. We do not even study the mathematics of gambling. Perhaps we could help our pupils if we did. A research project on both topics.
A student in her final year at a College of Education reflects on a lesson she gave, taped and transcribed. A model of self-appraisal, which will also stimulate thoughts about how to teach junior mathematics.
Regular racegoers, despite some low IQ scores, use, in that real world, extremely complex multivariate reasoning to pick winners. This research into IQ, expertise, and cognitive complexity has become a classic. New, further, discoveries are promised for set No.2.
Adults were interviewed to discover the mathematics they actually used in their everyday life and their workplaces. School mathematics is relatively unimportant but estimating, optimising, and using calculators are.
In the 'salad bowl' of ethnic and cultural diversity of Hawai'i, there are attempts to make school work more relevant to all cultures, including involuntary minorities such as the indigenous Hawaiians. Teaching geometry in new ways is the focus of the research described here.
In four different countries, including our own, the same problems keep cropping up - children do not connect simple tasks, such as sharing, with the written fractions they meet in class. Research and good advice therefrom.
