Module 4: Balancing our use of Conceptual and Procedural Knowledge
Objectives:
Learners will be able to:
- Find the right balance of conceptual and procedural knowledge based questions.
Poll Time!
Should there be a 50/50 balance between teaching procedural knowledge and teaching conceptual knowledge? In other words, if you took a math test, should there be a 50/50 balance between the amount of procedural questions and the amount of conceptual questions?
After viewing the results, has your mind changed?
Questions for you to journal about!
Please answer the following questions in your journal under "Module 4 Notes:"
- Does your answer to the poll match your current classroom practices?
- If you answered no to this question, do you want to make an adjustment?
- How does your answer compare to others? Are you part of the majority or the minority?
What Balance Might be Right for you?
This is a very tough question to ask! There are a lot of variables that could affect your answer to this question. However, I would love to hear your thoughts as I still ponder this question from time to time!
Please write down your ratio in the Google Form below:
My Thoughts:
According to welltrainedmind.com "Students who only learn procedure will find themselves, at the upper levels, carrying out algorithms without understanding why the steps work." This leads to complacency and a complete disregard to learning the "how" and "why." Students become satisfied with "good enough."
My goal as a 7-12 mathematics educator is to do my best to avoid student complacency. Thus, I need to make sure that my balance of focusing on procedural fluency and conceptual fluency is fairly close to 50/50. Now, I do understand that 50/50 may be unrealistic given the nature of mathematics. As stated many times before, mathematics is very skill-based thus teaching procedures is important and necessary. But, making sure to have students make connections between each skill that they learn is imperative.
My ratio: So, if I were to give you a ratio that I want to stick by. I would say 60/40. Meaning that 60% of the time I am focusing on procedural knowledge and 40% of the time I am focusing on conceptual knowledge.
Like I said before, many factors go into this ratio. I teach 7th grade mathematics. My thoughts on this ratio may be completely different to that of a Calculus teacher.
Overall, I hope that you do walk away with having a slightly higher emphasis on conceptual knowledge after going through my mini-course!
Here is a link to proceed to Module 5: Exploration of Project-Based Learning with Conceptual Knowledge:
Module 5: Exploration of Project-Based Learning with Conceptual Knowledge