After reading Chapter One, I began thinking about activities that involve working memory and possible ways to modify them. I thought about a practice activity that we do in math class as a way to help strengthen working memory. At the end of class, we do a short mental math activity, where we'll give 3-4 short instructions that students need to follow in order to come up with the correct answer. For example we may say:
-Take one dozen
-Divide that by 2
-add 7
We will repeat each step at least twice and take long pauses between steps to accomodate various levels of processing speeds.
It occurs to me that although we try to accomodate various learners, it may be too much for some learners. After reading this chapter, it appears that although the directions are very short, it may be too difficult to hold on to the number and listen to the next direction. One way to modify this may be to write each step on the board so the student can have a visual to correspond with the auditory directions.
2 comments:
Shannon,
I use the same strategy every math class as a a ticket to leave. Students will work on a white board to show their understanding. Some students with poor auditory memory will right down the directions and then work out the problem.
Chrissie
It seems to me like there is such large group of students in class that have great difficulty with the mental math activities. We also use whiteboards to work them out on, but I will often ask a student to explain how the solved the problem in order to verbally explain how they were able to answer accurately, usually the student will chunk the steps used and mentally hold that bit of info as a set, then take another chuck and lastly put them together to find the correct answer at the end. It is funny to see because they usually hold up fingers as they repeat steps even if the number is too large, it helps them.
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