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Talk Through Math Concepts

Tags

Mathematics All Ages Strategy

Skills

Abstract Reasoning Visual Memory Spatial Perception

Talk Through Math Concepts

If your student struggles with conceptual understanding in math and science, particularly if their verbal skills are stronger

Instruction And Practice

  1. Objective: Students will take the time to explain or talk through visual math concepts and problems to increase their understanding. This approach is especially helpful for students with stronger verbal skills.
  2. Discuss how explaining one's thinking out loud as you work through a problem helps you understand what you're doing and why. Model how to talk through and describe what you are seeing in a problem or material. Have students practice a simple problem after you've modeled a few. (Examples on the next slide).
  3. Use numberless word problems or cover up numbers in word problems so students do not focus on computing and getting an answer, but focus on what the problem is asking.
  4. Teachers Notes: Model for students the difference between explaining their own thought process and simply paraphrasing what they have read or heard. Encourage detailed descriptions. This approach applies to any type of math problem, not just visual, but can be especially helpful for problems involving graphs, charts and geometric concepts.

Examples

Younger Students: For learning new geometric concepts, students can make comparisons between what they already know and what they are learning. For example, you might help a student describe a parallelogram out loud. A parallelogram is really just a diamond (rhombus). It looks like a square that someone pulled and stretched.

Older Students: Visual problems might require understanding a graph. Students can talk through the two axes and describe the data points in terms of what they see, as well as positioning, directionality and spatial relationships between the data points. I see that there is 1 inch of space between point A and point B, but then the space to point C is about 3 times that.

Why It Works (the Science Of Learning)!

Taking the time to explain or talk through a problem will help understanding and retention. Self-explanation takes time and effort, as students must really think through and explain in their own words. However, much research by Koedinger and others on self-explanation suggests that prompting students to provide verbal explanations of problem solving can aid in more robust learning.

Best-suited for students with weaker: Attention, Flexible Thinking, Inhibition, Long-term Memory, Metacognition, Working Memory, Visual Processing (Source: Digital Promise Learner Variability Project)