Talk:Mini Course: Customary and Metric Units of Measurement

Instructor comments on your draft units -- Jz833665 16:15, 29 November 2011 (EST)

Hi Hailey, The units you've drafts are overall in a good shape. To further refine the lessons, you may think about using authentic problem situations to ground/drive student learning in each unit. Your opening question might be refined following suggestions from Making Math Problematic. See its unit 1.

Peer Review comments by Serafina Chinappi

Hailey, I agree with instructor Zhang that overall units are well thought out. He suggests that you might take a more problematic approach to learning... I agree with this, as teaching math in this way will help learners to not merely remember a rule (smaller --> larger = divide, larger --> smaller = multiply), but rather will encourage them to understand why this is true. For instance, you might encourage students to measure the length of a variety of objects in their house (such as a bed, oven, microwave, television) in both feet and inches. As they do this, they will be discovering that there are 12 times as many inches as there are feet. While it is not as problematic as is encouraged by the approach I highlight in my final project, it is learner-based in that they are actively constructing their own understanding. A more problematic task, within each unit, could be for example to ask students to determine the distance in centimeters from the earth to the moon, or on a smaller scale from their house to their school. Overall, I think you have done a nice job on your design.