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Division By Fractions. Profound Understanding Of Fundamental. When And How Is. A Note about the 20th Anniversary Edition. The four common topics that were tested for by the TELT were: subtraction, multiplication, division by fractions and the relationship between area and perimeter. Due to these diverse topics in the questionnaire the teachers subject knowledge at both conceptual and procedural levels at the elementary level could be judged quite comprehensively.
The sample for this study was composed of two set of teachers. One from the U. There were 23 U. Out of these 23, 12 had an experience of 1 year of teaching, and the rest 11 had average teaching experience of 11 years. In China 72 teachers were selected, who came from diverse nature of schools. In these 72, 40 had experience of less than 5 years of teaching, 24 had more than 5 years of teaching experience, and the remaining 8 had taught for more than 18 years average.
Each teacher was interviewed for the conceptual and procedural understanding for the four topics mentioned. We now take a look at the various problems posed to the teachers and their typical responses. Lets spend some time thinking about one particular topic that you may work with when you teach, subtraction and regrouping. What would you say pupils would need to understand or be able to do before they could start learning subtraction with regrouping?
Although this problem appears to be simple and very elementary not all teachers were aware of the conceptual scheme behind subtraction by regrouping. Seventy seven percent of the U. The understanding of these teachers was limited to just taking and changing steps. This limitation was evident in their capacity to promote conceptual learning in the class room.
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Also the various levels of conceptual understanding were also displayed. On the other hand the Chinese teachers used subtraction in computations as decomposing a higher value unit, and many of them also used non-standard methods of regrouping and their relations with standard methods. Also most of the Chinese teachers mentioned that after teaching this to students they would like to have a class discussion, so as to clarify the concepts.
The problem posed to the teachers in this topic was: Some sixth-grade teachers noticed that several of their students were making the same mistake in multiplying large numbers. What would you do if you were teaching the sixth grade and you noticed that several of your students were doing this? Most of the teachers agreed that this was a genuine problem in students understanding than just careless shifting of digits, meant for addition.
But different teachers had different views about the error made by the student. The problem in the students understanding as seen by the teachers were reflections of their own knowledge of the subject matter. For most of the U. On the other hand the Chinese teachers displayed a conceptual understanding of the multidigit multiplication.
The explanation and the algorithm used by the Chinese teachers were thorough and many times novel. People seem to have different approaches to solving problems involving division with fractions. How do you solve a problem like this one? Imagine that you are teaching division with fractions. To make this meaningful for kids, sometimes many teachers try to do is relate mathematics to other things.
Sometimes they try to come up with real-world situations or story-problems to show the application of some particular piece of content. As in the previous two cases the U. Only one teacher was successful in generating an illustration for the correct representation of the given problem. On the other hand all the Chinese teachers did the computational part correctly, and a few teachers were also able to explain the rationale behind the calculations.
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