BLOGS WEBSITE

Monthly Archives: August 2015

Pure play

The other day I did a workshop with students from Advanced Mathematical Economics III, which is more or less a pure maths course for economics students. It covers such things as mathematical logic, analysis and topology — all a bit intimidating for students who started out the degree with almost no mathematical background!
We had just […]

Posted in How people learn (or don't), Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged , |

Leave a comment

Obscuring the GST by making it simple

I was helping out at Roseworthy Campus yesterday as the Vet Medicine students were learning about budgeting for a Vet Clinic as a business. One aspect of this was calculating the amount of the cost of goods and services that was GST (stands for “Goods and Services Tax” — in other countries it’s known as […]

Posted in How people learn (or don't), Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged , |

Leave a comment

There is only one kind of function that distributes over plus

There is a very common thing that students do that causes pain, distress, confusion and depression in any maths educator who witnesses it. Both the error itself and the educator’s response to it are very clearly described by this excellent picture from the blog “Math with Bad Drawings”:
Every single one of the statements in that […]

Posted in How people learn (or don't), Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged |

Leave a comment

Education research reading: effective feedback

After warning months ago that there would be more posts about my research reading, but I didn’t follow through. Finally here is a “Research Reading” post. This one is about how feedback helps students learn. I’ll discuss several papers which list principles/challenges for providing effective feedback.
Gibbs, G and Simpson, C (2004) The conditions under […]

Posted in Education reading | Tagged |

Comments Off on Education research reading: effective feedback