Recently, I ran into an article in Education Week entitled “The Math Standards and Moving Beyond the Worksheet.” In it a high school mathematics teacher (Algebra 2 and AP Calculus) described the laminated poster she had in her classroom where all of the state standards were listed. She described how as she and her students progressed through the day-by-day plan of the sections of the textbook, crossing off each standard covered at the end of each lesson. The more she taught this way, the more she realized that “teaching math” and “covering textbook sections” were not synonymous.
Ultimately her teaching experiences have caused her to ask “do the students really have a solid understanding of the mathematics they are using? And, more importantly, do they understand why they’re using it?”
I think you know where I’m going with this. Too often in computer science courses (and in fact in other IT courses that are offered in high school and I dare say in post-secondary) are planned so that a certain amount of material is “covered”. Students get to practice modifying and writing code but often have no clue why they are writing this code. They get to memorize some syntax but don’t understand what they’re memorizing. There’s little of no context within which their work in writing code can be placed. One might call this “context-free content”. I think the author of the article is saying the same thing, but for mathematics.
Another way to look at this is to relate it to G. Polya’s four-step problem solving approach:
- Understand the problem
- Design a solution
- Solve the problem
- Assess your solution
Too often particularly in my early years of teaching computer science, I would “understand” the problem for them (put it in simplistic terms, over-simplifying), then with them I would “design” a solution (though even these simplistic problems might have had several approaches, we ended up with one). They’d “solve” the problem (of course the detailed design encouraged almost identical solutions) and I would develop the test cases to see if their program “worked.”
There is little ownership by the students, little opportunity for real insight into any of these steps, little reason to learn and understand the programming techniques beyond the next test.
I know I had to work hard to get my students to expand their involvement beyond coding something that either we or I had understood, designed and assessed. It wasn’t always easy but helping students find a context for their work with more realistic problems and situations always paid off with students being able to apply what they learned later in the course and more importantly in later courses. Open-ended problems helps out a lot.
Think about helping students understand the “why” along with the “how” of computer programming, especially when you’re given a course and a text to “cover” with a group of students.
Find a context for the content.
(full URL for the article: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/03/27/26crowley.h32.html?tkn=LNSFw%2FMoqekT4IEeYBSFfusZ4rOHVCeJYo%2F0&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1 )
