Essay on "School System Places the Right Amount"

Essay 12 pages (3575 words) Sources: 1 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

school system places the right amount of emphasis on rote memorization? How important is it to teach students to think more critically, to connect and evaluate their ideas? Describe a course that you took in high school that you think would have been much more effective if it were taught through critical thinking instead of rote memorization and explain why.

Rote memorization is a process of education far too often appealed to in the formal academic setting. It is a regrettable appeal to long-standing and fairly uncreative modes of instruction in which the dry recitation of information would be conflated with the passage of knowledge. Indeed, far to great an emphasis is typically placed on an approach to instruction which does not promote critical engagement of the subject matter and which poorly approximates the experience of gaining knowledge.

A primary example of this is in high school mathematics, where the dual emphasis on operational proficiency and positive grade evaluation functioned to promote one of the least engaging courses of academia in spite of a subject which has extremely compelling implications. Far too often, mathematics instruction would be limited to the explanation of operation and would provide far less time investigating the broader implications of these operations.

Such is to say that mathematics instruction has quite often failed to effectively convey the natural beauty and all-encompassing permeation of mathematics principles. It is only later in one's education that these applications become apparent, but for those deprived of this insight during high school, interest in the subject has already been spoiled. This is the danger in using rote memorization as a way to stimulate learning. Recall will not associate this information with any more important emotional or philosophical cues due to an instruction which failed to implant these.

Though word problems would hint at the broader implications of the subject, their presentation would rarely be a cause of discussion or conceptual elaboration so much as a vehicle for operationalization. Later opportunities in education demonstrate an approach which should be taken early in one's math education, in which memorization is eschewed in favor of active experimentation. The wooden derby race is a good way to engage students thusly, with students designing miniature derby cars, rolling them down an incline and timing the results. This could produce a bevy of calculative activities extending from the original project.

By and large though, mathematics tended to facilitate an instructional methods distinguished by its absence of imagination and flexibility. The method of rote memorization more than the subject itself is responsible for this failure to engage. This is to say that the practice may be observed in vocabulary education as a well, a context where it is especially poorly suited to the acquisition of knowledge.

Though some aspect of memorization is only sensible, such as with the early induction of children into an understanding of the alphabet, as students grow more sophisticated, this approach is increasingly less useful or recommended. Critical assessment and practical application are two of the most important aspects of one's education, helping one to make the transition from attention to information to the ability to use this as knowledge and to ultimately develop into skill.

In the context of vocabulary, there is little to be gained in simply memorizing words and their definitions. If a student is unable to apply these words in writing, in conversation or in internal comprehension, than this memorization has precious little worth. Quite unfortunately, this is not a perspective which seemed to have been understood by the curriculum designers and educators in my high school. Few and far between were those that attempted to move beyond the traditional methods of recitation and regurgitation to challenge our sensibilities and inflame our opinions. This is regrettable because in a great many subjects, the opportunity to gain knowledge would be lost in a shuffle of facts, figures, dates and names that have very little relevance to the philosophical and intellectual implications of that which I have studied.

Chose some specific material that would typically be learned at the level of education (elementary, secondary, or higher) in which you are interested. Explain in detail according to information processing theory how this material would be encoded and stored. What practical techniques might be used to enhance retention of this material?

It can often be extremely challenging to motivate an entire classroom of students in the mathematics discipline. While there will inevitably be a number of students prone to success, a majority of students will require meaningful incentives in order to be receptive to that which math has to offer. Its importance in establishing foundations for rational reasoning, concrete operationalization and problem quantification may all be illustrated to students through well-conceived motivational methods.

Project-orientation is an effective way to encourage inclusive class participation, idea application and the pursuit of identifiable goals. In elementary math education, it is appropriate to begin to create group project structures in which students apply mathematic principles to the creation of hypothetical business models, budget balancing projects or even simple investment strategies. By demonstrating the real-world applications for students, such projects not only arm students with an ability to conceptualize important life skills but they will help the instructor to avoid the historically persistent student plaint that 'I'm never going to need to know this stuff.' By bringing students into an involvement with such projects, it is possible to help bridge some of the limitations in traditional mathematics education that have failed to effectively engaging learning interests. (Salend, 1)

This is a perspective on instruction that proceeds from the information processing theory, which argues that "this is done on a continuum from perception, through attention, to labeling, and finally, meaning. The key point is that all stimuli that activate a sensory receptor cell are permanently stored in memory, but that different levels of processing (i.e., elaboration) contribute to an ability to access, or retrieve, that memory." (Huitt, 1) This means that where mathematics is concerned, a failure to contextualize instruction in such a way as to promote multiple ways of perceiving the knowledge is tantamount to a failure to properly engage students on all levels. The orientation toward a project which presents mathematics concepts at the levels of attention, labeling and assignment of meaning can significantly improve the student's ability to reflect on the lesson according to both its academic and practical implications.

Another way to motivate actually operates on the inverse principle of cultivating that with which students are already familiar from their own experiences in order to foster better assimilation of math principles. The pervasion of information and ideas through various media sources today means that students arrive in the latter years of elementary school presumably already armed with a considerable wealth of information, especially relative to those generations which predated the integration of internet technologies. It is advisable for an instructor to understand and respect the relevance of such information by incorporating into class lessons applied examples of operations that relate to student consumer patterns, cultural interests and socio-economic circumstances. The suburban school where I have based this discussion enables for the insertion into math-oriented material examples derived from the prices of trading cards, the salaries of movie stars and the line-item value of the items in their refrigerators at home. By using concepts for which students already have a framework, this approach to math instruction avoids the disconnect which may often occur when students approach the subject with an assumption of its irrelevance. This method of instruction demonstrates the important principle that numbers are all around us. And it is especially practical where the student less inclined toward mathematics interest is concerned, helping to induce an understanding of mathematics principles while becoming more practically acquainted with living responsibilities. (Johnson, 1)

A new and crucial element of bringing students into a greater comfort with mathematics has been the incorporation of evolving technologies into instructional and extra-curricular strategies. Students arrive at the later elementary school level with a degree of technology savvy that, in some cases, exceeds that of the faculty. It is necessary to factor that into educational and testing methods in order to help contextualize mathematics in ways with which students are inherently comfortable. Incorporation of software and web-based instructional methods is becoming increasingly standardized.

And yet, in our consideration, some more traditional materials may be most effective as a way of providing students with the building blocks for the projects and software applications discussed here above. Thus, one of the best ways to promote information processing is through the use of strictly visual materials. In the context of elementary math education, I have found the 100-Board to be a particularly effective tool. This provides me with a multi-functional visual display through which the multiplication tables can be demonstrated. Here, students may be instructed to identify every third square, then to use the pattern illustrated to assign a set of visual cues to comprehending the multiples of three. Subsequently, the student can return to… READ MORE

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