How to Improve Your Students' Mastery of Math?

If you are a teacher who is finding it hard to engage your students in class, you are not alone. Many teachers in the other schools and generations of teachers before them, have faced the challenge of getting their students interested in this traditionally dry academic subject.

All is not lost. There is light at the end of the tunnel. You can turn those unmotivated students into eager learners. By following the suggested techniques listed below, you just might turn your math class into the most anticipated class in their schedule.

1. Make students’ thinking and learning visible through Web 2.0 tools

With the popularity of the internet and Web 2.0 tools, students today are constantly using online platforms such as facebook and twitter to express themselves and reach out to the world.

By incorporating online discussions and providing opportunities for students to share their learning online, you make learning a more interactive and social process for the students. Most importantly, you begin to communicate in their language and they will respond positively.

2. Spice up the lesson with multimedia.
Include elements of fun in your lesson to break up the monotony in class. You do not have to deliver instruction and content in front of the class all the time. Make your math lesson more interesting by incorporating math games, music, videos and other online activities into your learning activities. By skilfully wrapping these interesting activities around a mathematical concept, you can achieve your lesson objective and yet have fun.

3. Relate learning with authentic real life examples.
Students are constantly exposed to tonnes of information daily. If they are not able to connect the math concept with their lives, they will find it hard to understand and are unable to retain the lesson taught. By showing how math concepts can be applied to real life examples, students begin to see the relevance and will be more likely to remember it.

4. Try flipping your classroom
When you are introducing a new concept, consider creating a short online package with videos to illustrate the concept and a short survey to check their understanding. Encourage students to view these contents prior to class. By analysing the result of the survey, you will know what are the common misconceptions faced by the students before the start of the lesson. You can spend more time addressing these learning gaps and answering students’ questions as they are engage in learning activities that elicit high order thinking skills.

5. Encourage students to create learning artefacts
To help students transfer their learning, you can design some end-of-topic activities that involve students creating a simple math game, composing a song ,creating a video or slideshow to illustrate their understanding. The purpose of these activities is to give students the opportunities to apply their understanding of the concept to create meaningful learning artefacts. Besides conceptual understanding, students will need to apply creativity and high-order thinking skills to communicate their ideas across to their target audience. These are certainly desirable outcomes of learning.

6. Stretch your gifted students.
As a teacher, you have a tendency to spend a more time helping weaker students who do not understand a concept. This will take time away from the gifted students, who would benefit from an additional challenge to stretch their ability. By designing self-directed online math modules that take the mathematical concept to the next level, the gifted students in your class can be actively engaged while you continue to narrow the performance gaps for the rest of the class.

7. Provide additional online resources to aid the weaker students.
In general, some students would need a little bit more time and space to understanding a concept and they would definitely benefit from differentiated instruction methods. To support this group of students without delaying the rest of the class, you can consider assigning the weaker students to review online learning materials such as self-directed online lessons, videos and online assessment as part of their homework.

By incorporating all of the above tips into your math lessons, you will better capture the attention of your students and increase their mastery of math. Give them a try today!